Talking about Past Habits

Habits are routine actions. Habits tend to repeat themselves. Past habits are routines and
repeated actions that occurred in the past but no longer happen. We use 'would' and 'used to'
to talk about these habits; however, there is a distinction that requires your attention:

 'Would' only talks about past habits when the time frame is specified in the sentence.
We can use would to talk about repeated past actions that don't happen anymore.
Have a look:

I would play Basketball when I was 10.

Here, we are indicating 'when' this habit happened.

When I was younger, I would watch my favorite movie on repeat.

 'Used to' talks about routine actions that stopped occurring in the past but we are not
sharing the specific time frame. We can use used to to talk about past states that are
not true any more

I used to play Basketball.

Here, we do not know the specific time of this habit but we know it is in the past.

I used to watch my favorite movie on repeat.

Talking about Past States

When we want to talk about a situation or a certain state in the past, we use 'used to.' Note
that we cannot use 'would' in this case since we are using stative verbs such as love, feel, be,
and know. For example:

When I was younger, I used to live in California.

When I was younger, I would live in California.