How Habits Work

themedalist

Hello Everyone!

Since our group is focused on creating healthy habits, I thought it would be useful to pull together some of the information I've collected on habits over the last 5 years. Habits fascinate me and I've used every opportunity I can to deepen my understanding of them. I'm excited to share what I've learned with you!

If you want to change your life, change your habits. Our habits are the invisible forces that shape our lives. In the last 20 years there’s been an explosion in the scientific understanding about habits. We can now tap into this research and use the major findings to build a better life for ourselves.

Why Should You Care About Habits?

Charles Duhigg, author of “The Power of Habit”:

“Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they’re not. They’re habits. And though each habit means relatively little on its own, over time, the meals we order, what we say to our kids each night, whether we save or spend, how often we exercise, and the way we organize our thoughts and work routines have enormous impacts on our health, productivity, financial security, and happiness.”

How Habits Work

For a good summary of the 3 components of every habit and how we can modify these components to discard bad habits and build better ones, see this page:

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10700000/oct-8-weekly-challenge-how-habits-work/p1

Breaking the Sitting Habit

Most of us sit too much and excessive sitting is now recognized as a major health risk. If you know you need to sit less and move more, you've come to the right place! I run a free online program, Quitting the Sitting, to help people find workable ways to be more active in their daily lives. Want a gentle reminder to get up and move? Join us on Facebook and Twitter. No spam, just a few weekly posts to inspire you to keep moving.

And sitting less can help you lose weight!


Habits Resources

Some of my favorite resources on habits include:

James Clear
Through his free newsletter, James Clear writes about the science of changing behaviors and adopting new habits and practices. He's also produced and makes available a free e-book on Transforming Your Habits. Other newsletters may get overlooked or deleted once they reach your inbox, but not James Clear's. It's that good. He has compiled his years of extensive research on habits into the book, Atomic Habits, now a New York Times bestseller. Highly recommended!


​The Habit Guide: Zen Habits’ Effective Habit Methods & Solutions
by Leo Babauta
Well-regarded habits practitioner Leo Babauta has developed this terrific e-book guide to understanding how habits are formed, effective methods for overcoming obstacles to building new habits, and solutions to the most common habit problems. Through his Sea Change program, Leo also provides a month-long online program devoted to building frequently desired new habits.

​
Tiny Habits
Noted habit researcher and Stanford psychologist BJ Fogg has created an excellent framework for quickly adopting small, yet impactful new behaviors. His Tiny Habits program is entirely on-line, free of charge, and is easy and fun to do. Over 40,000 people have successfully used the Tiny Habits program. New classes start each Monday.

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
by Charles Duhigg
Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Charles Duhigg has synthesized reams of information regarding what we now know about habits, cravings, and willpower. He then applies this research to a string of engaging stories of how individuals, corporations, and societies have transformed habits for their own purposes and how we can use this new information to make beneficial changes to our lives and communities.

themedalist

How Habits Work

If you want to change your life, change your habits. Our habits are the invisible forces that shape our lives. In the last 20 years there’s been an explosion in the scientific understanding about habits. We can now tap into this research and use the major findings to build a better life for ourselves.

Of course, there’s no way I can summarize and encapsulate all the fascinating aspects of habits. It’s too broad and too deep. My goal is to give you enough information and a structure for taking actionable steps to create small habits that will help you reach your goals. There are also lots of suggested resources should you want to explore habits in more detail.


Why Should You Care About Habits?

Charles Duhigg, author of “The Power of Habit”:

“Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they’re not. They’re habits. And though each habit means relatively little on its own, over time, the meals we order, what we say to our kids each night, whether we save or spend, how often we exercise, and the way we organize our thoughts and work routines have enormous impacts on our health, productivity, financial security, and happiness.”

Some Interesting Facts About Habits

1. Habits are essential to our daily lives. Think about all the tiny steps involved in the simple habit of brushing your teeth. If each day you had to relearn this sequence of steps, your brain would get tired and overwhelmed very quickly. The brain’s ability to seamlessly move through a sequence of steps on autopilot is what enables us to go through our day with relative ease. Routine tasks can be automated into habits allowing us to focus on more complex tasks.

2. Roughly half of our daily actions are habits. At some point, we made the decision to do a certain habit, but over time and after repeatedly doing the habit, we don’t consciously make the choice anymore, nor are we even usually aware that we are doing our habit. They run on autopilot, which makes them hard to break. Technically, a habit is something we do automatically without being aware we are doing it. When it’s something we do repeatedly that we are consciously aware we’re doing, that’s a practice or routine, not a habit. Practically speaking, these subtle differences in definition aren’t important.

3. No, it doesn’t take 21 days to form a new habit. How long it takes to build a new habit depends mostly on how complex the habit is and how motivated the person is to create it. A very simple habit can be learned in a few days if a person is very motivated. More complex habits, such as stopping smoking, typically take much longer.

4. You can’t force yourself to develop new habits. Human beings are hardwired to do things that they want to do and get rewards from doing. Don’t try to force yourself to learn a new habit if it’s not something you want to do. It won’t work and it won’t be sustainable. Pick a new behavior that you want to do.

5. Think small and then build. The most successful new habits are those that are incredibly small. Since they don’t require much effort or motivation, our naturally resistant to change brains will be far more receptive to sticking with the new action. If your goal is to exercise 30 minutes a day, start with 2 to 5 minutes of walking or another easy-to-do exercise. Small habits are the foundation of the Tiny Habits program, that many of us will be doing alongside our challenge this week.

Start a very small habit, get into a routine, and then build from there.


6. Good Habit or Bad Habit? Your brain doesn’t care. Our brains make no distinction nor have any preference for Good Habits (those that help us) and Bad Habits (those that set us back).

7. Habits are triggered by our environment. What you see, hear, smell, and feel in your home, office, and other environments are powerful cues that trigger the habits you have. Location, time of day, a series of thoughts, and other people can also be triggers. Want to start a new habit? Take a vacation that gets you out of your usual environment.


The Three Components of a Habit (Called the Habit Loop)

The Cue: This is the trigger that starts the habit in motion. There is always a cue, even if it’s subtle and not something we’re aware of. The trigger can be a visual cue or an auditory cue such as the phone ringing. A habit can also be triggered by the time of day, which is why most of us move through the habit of brushing our teeth every morning and night.

The Routine: This is the habit itself, the series of steps you take quickly and effortlessly when you do the habit.

The Reward: In order for us to keep doing the habit, there has to be some reward or benefit that we derive. Sometimes it’s not obvious what we get from doing the habit and it can take some digging to figure it out. But we now know that rewards are a fundamental part of creating and maintaining habits.

Cues and Rewards are Connected

Cues also trigger the brain to remember the reward from doing the habit, setting off a craving for the reward. Even if we are not aware of it, our cravings for rewards drive the habit loop. Yes, donut shops really stack the odds against you.

You Can Visualize the Habit Loop as This:



Once you understand the components of every habit, you can start fiddling with and adjusting the three parts to create new habits or modify an existing habit. And that’s our challenge this week!

My Cheezits Habit

Several years ago I started the very bad habit of snacking on Cheezits. The cue in this case was the bright red box of Cheezits that sat on top of my refrigerator. The habit was mindlessly gulping down several handfuls of these salty, yummy crackers and not logging it into my food diary. The reward was clearly the taste. Despite seeing the box perched on the refrigerator for many years, I never ate them. It wasn’t a habit. And then for some reason, I started diving into the box with a disturbing regularity and it didn’t take more than a few days to create a new bad habit. I started getting cravings for Cheezits. Food cravings are nothing more than turbo charged habits. Knowing this and understanding the habit loop, the simplest way for me to break my Cheezits habit was to move the visual cue. I took the box off of the refrigerator and put it in the back of a cupboard. When I no longer saw the box every time I walked into the kitchen, it only took a few days for the habit cravings to subside.


The Most Effective Way to Create New Habits

The best way to create a new habit and have it stick is to anchor the new behavior to an existing habit that you already do. That existing habit becomes the cue that triggers you to do the new habit. The anchor needs to be something that you do every day or several times a day. Alternatively, it can be something that happens to you during the day such as the phone ringing or when you’re stopped at a traffic light. Clearly, using traffic cues as anchors can get pretty dicey.

Getting out of bed, brushing your teeth, pouring yourself that first cup of coffee or tea are just a few examples of anchors that make good triggers for new habits. When I did the Tiny Habits program a few weeks ago, I chose the new habit of thinking of something I’m grateful for when I took my first sip of coffee in the morning. I’m still doing that habit.



Practice and Repetition Leads to Success

In order to make your new action a habit, you’re going to have to do it repeatedly until it becomes automatic for you. It’s impossible to make something a habit when you only do it occasionally. Choose a new habit that you can practice daily, or better yet several times a day, and it will be easier to keep doing.

This critical step is the breakdown point for most wannabe habits. People will practice their new habit for awhile and then stop doing it and wonder why the habit didn’t stick. Because it wasn’t truly a habit and wasn’t given enough time, effort, practice, or rewards to become a habit. Whatever small habit(s) you select to work on this week, plan on working on them for several weeks into the foreseeable future, if you want to have them stick. It may not take that long, but it could.


Don’t Skip the Reward

Cues start the habit and rewards keep us wanting to do the habit again. It can be tough to think of an appropriate reward for a new healthy habit, since the rewards tend to accrue years from now. Simple verbal positive reinforcements can be an effective reward. “Way to go, me!” or something similar, may seem a little silly, but it’s an effective response to completing a new action that we want to become a habit.

Rewards are a critical step in habit building because they help your brain decide if a particular series of steps is worth automating into a habit so that it can be recalled in the future.

Don’t skip the reward. :-)

Suggested Resources:

Forget Big Change, Start with a Tiny Habit
http://bit.ly/fogg-tedx

Charles Duhigg, “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business”
http://charlesduhigg.com/the-power-of-habit/

Podcast interview with Charles Duhigg on Habits
https://www.npr.org/2012/12/24/167977418/the-power-to-trade-naughty-habits-for-nice-ones

James Clear’s The Habits Guide: How to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones
https://jamesclear.com/habits

Tiny Habits
http://tinyhabits.com

..................................................................................................

themedalist

I thought some members of our group might be interested in a closer look at the Fogg Behavioral Model. This model sheds some light on the interplay between Motivation, Ability, Cues, and building new habits. I've found it very helpful in thinking about new behaviors that I might create and whether they've got the staying power to stick around and become true habits. Most of us can do lots of things for a while. But can we keep doing them 6 months or a year from now? That's the real test of a habit.

The Fogg Behavioral Model says we act when Motivation, Ability, and a Cue occur at the same time. We can visualize it graphically like this:

.

Here, the Action Line is the boundary line that separates actions we can take based on our motivation and ability from actions we can't take due to our motivation and ability.

Shading the graph helps a lot!

NO HABIT CAN FORM REGION:



The rose-colored region is where a habit can't take root. Either the action is too difficult or we are not sufficiently motivated to do it. Here, a Cue or Prompt won't be useful and could be annoying because we can't do this action. We don't want to be reminded about something we can't do.

HABITS CAN GROW REGION:



But in the green region above the Action Line, a habit could take hold because we are sufficiently motivated and/or the action is well within our ability to do. In this region, the Cue is essential because this is a new action for us. Even if we are motivated, and even if we have the ability, without that Cue we will likely forget to do the action. When Motivation, Ability, and a Cue converge at the same time? PURE MAGIC!

Now, let's take an example and consider a typical New Year's Resolution. Most people are highly motivated on January first. They're excited for the clean slate, endless possibilities that the new year brings. Let's think about a typical New Year's Resolution: to go to the gym for 60 minutes, 5 times a week. Let's further assume that this fictitious person is new to exercising. He or she doesn't really want to exercise, they are just making it their resolution because they think they *should* exercise more. Because this person isn't accustomed to exercising, trying to be at the gym for a full hour, 5 days a week is a really difficult goal to set...not an easy thing to do at all! But because they start out on Jan 1st highly motivated, their graph might look like this:



Their sheer motivation propels them to the gym and they can overcome this difficult action and meet their 1 hour gym goal.

But usually, after a couple of weeks motivation wanes. It may be easier to go to the gym (maybe they see a friend there or set their clothes out the night before) but with much lower motivation, they can barely keep going to the gym:



And usually...you can guess what happens next...by the end of January their motivation has plummeted and there's no more gym:




Sadly, this is what happens with most New Year's Resolutions.

But what would happen if this person scrapped the idea of going to the gym every day for an hour and instead made their goal something much easier to do, like going to the gym for just 15 minutes? That might look like this:



SUCCESS!

Which brings us back to why all the habits researchers urge us to start with a small action and focus on that through repetition until it becomes truly a habit. Because small actions are easier to do and thus require little or no motivation. Motivation fluctuates too much for us to rely on it for habit building. By focusing instead on how to make something we want to do simpler and easier, especially when we are starting out, our chances for success skyrocket.

.................................................

TL;DR: Small changes win.