What’s a habit?
Habits are “actions that are triggered automatically in response to contextual cues that have been associated with their performance.”
It can take anywhere from 18 to 254 days for a person to form a new habit and an average of 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic.
Your brain likes habits (including those that serve you, and those that don’t) because they’re efficient. When you automate common actions, you free up mental resources for other tasks – like baking these healthy donuts.
Let’s chat Environment Design
In habit formation, your environment (home, office etc) impacts your repeated behaviours. For example, if my home kitchen is filled with cookies, I’m far more likely to eat a cookie (or six) as part of my regular diet. If instead I fill my home with fruits and veggies (and maybe just 1 or two protein cookies) the chances of making cookies part of my regular diet vastly diminishes.
I like to remind my nutrition clients ‘You can’t get well in an environment that made you sick’. It is time you optimised your environment to better suit your desired behaviours?
Task:
Take a look around at your common spaces – do they encourage the behaviours that best support your goals? If not, how can you make changes to encourage wanted behaviours?
Building Better Habits
Recommended reading from the Status 8020 Book Club:
Atomic Habits – James Clear
Tired of self-abandoning your values and goals for immediate gratification?
You want to workout but it’s cold right now – it’s easier to snooze the alarm at that moment than to go to the gym and wait for the long-term rewards.
You enjoy a healthy lunch, but feel like you need a sweet treat and instead of having 1 square of chocolate, you eat a whole block. You’ve had a big week and you tell yourself you deserve it.
These examples are what we call self-negotiation. Practised over and over again to achieve immediate satisfaction over long-term gain, we create automatic responses that are not aligned with our long-term goals. And then we feel guilty. We beat ourselves up for not being ‘motivated’ or dedicated enough.
I’m here to tell you that isn’t the case. What you experience is a set of ingrained behaviours that repeat. To interrupt that pattern, we need to look at what initiates, stimulates or cues the cascade of events. It generally works in 3 phases – trigger, response, reward.
1. TRIGGER:
A stimulus from the environment that sparks an auto-response; a cue initiating the behaviour. Habit triggers typically fit into four categories:
- Location
- Time
- Emotional state
- Other people
2. RESPONSE:
The physical action we take whenever presented with the trigger/cue. The behavior results from the trigger. Taking the same action in response to a cue repeatedly is what makes a behaviour a HABIT. Repetition wires neurons together, to create natural pathways that fire when triggered to automate the response. It’s a mechanism to reduce retinol decision-making, because making decisions uses a lot of energy in the brain, and the body likes to conserve this as much as possible.
E.g. I’m stressed so I distract myself with chocolate to soothe me in the moment. It worked, Hurrah! Now, every time I get an email from my boss (stress), I reach for Dairy Milk (soothe) and don’t even realise I’ve devoured a whole bar in 2 minutes (habit on auto).
3. REWARD:
What we gain from a habit fulfils the neural pathways job (protection), which is usually mis-aligned behaviour to relieve discomfort, distract, avoid a feeling, or fulfil a craving. The reward itself increases the chances of a habit sticking. If you enjoy the reward, the pleasurable release of dopamine kicks in, and then we want to do it again, again, and again — on a loop to get the same reward.
Yukky thing (trigger) = soothe immediately with auto – habit. This is your body at work. It’s subconscious.
You are not weak or unmotivated. You’re human. Your body is carrying out what it is designed to do.
To get us OUT of this unhelpful cycle, AWARENESS by your conscious self is needed – to rewire the auto-habit into something more aligned with your values.
Let’s dive into some tips to redesign your automatic responses and BUILD GOOD HABITS.
Tip 1: Awareness – Identifying your triggers
Use mindfulness to tap into what is driving your habits in the first place.
This requires self-reflection – How do I feel? What is happening? What am I observing?
I personally find a journal helpful, or jot things down in my phone notes. Before I reach for chocolate for example, I might interrupt the auto-response by questioning – what am I feeling right now?
It’s this conscious awareness that allows us to avoid the “cues” that trigger the habit in the first place.
For example, you usually have biscuits stored at the front of the snack cupboard. Usually seeing these is a trigger to start eating them. Instead, you move these to the back, and replace them with apples. Now every time you open the cupboard, you’ve removed the trigger itself, and find yourself responding differently in the same scenario (opening the cupboard).
Through mindfulness, you will become more aware of the triggers and “rewards” which are reinforcing certain behaviour.
Task:
For clarity and with honesty, ask yourself:
- Where do we draw our line with ourselves to align our actions with our core beliefs?
- Is this action helping me or hurting me?
- Is this aligned to my true goals and my beliefs and values?
Tip 2: Make a plan
Once you have examined your habits and the cue that triggers it, you can create a new reward value. Something that still brings dopamine as you need it, but is actually aligned with your core values.
For example, when I get stressed, I’m going to go for a walk in nature. It’s aligned with my goals because it feels good and soothes me, PLUS, it helps me get extra steps in to reach my goal of losing weight.
At first, the change in response will feel uncomfortable because you’re overriding your subconscious desires, using your conscious mind to respond. Over time, NEW neural pathways will begin to form, and this response will itself become a subconscious habit that requires little effort. This is what we call neuroplasticity – the ability as humans to change HOW the brain auto-responds – adapting to new experiences.
This is going to take all of your attention. Once you have mastered a new auto-response aligned with your values, THEN pick another one. Trying to change too many responses will likely end in failure and re-affirm that GUILT.
Tip 3: Introduce or remove friction:
Changing unhelpful habits by making them more difficult to do (introducing friction), can help create new helpful habits. As humans we like to take the path of least resistance, so creating LESS resistance helps us build better responses.
Example 1: ‘I want to workout in the morning but I don’t have time.’
REMOVE friction: lay out gym clothes at the side of the bed to save 10 minutes.
Example 2: ‘I want to workout but it’s easier to snooze my alarm’
CREATE friction: move your phone to the kitchen so you’re already out of bed to stop the alarm.
Key Takeaways:
Habits follow a pattern known as a ‘habit loop’
= (trigger) cue/reminder → response → reward
Understanding this pattern will expose the triggers and will allow you to establish what
NEW course of action to take, consciously, to build habits aligned with your goals.
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