A brief reminder of a powerful yet underrated tool: Habits

Habits control our daily lives - for better or worse! The key to a more energetic life is to recognize the bad ones and 'Neville Longbottom' them into more beneficial routines.

I would like you to take a quick moment to look back at what you did today and maybe yesterday. It doesn’t really matter if you have achieved nobel price level stuff or not, anything matters.

Now that we are contemplating it might be interesting to know that about 40 percent of all the actions (or processes) that you have performed were based on habits.

Now that’s quite a chunk, isn’t it? It might be worth to look a bit closer at the following questions, shall we?

• What are habits?
• How can habits be changed?
• What can YOU do, starting today?

What are habits?

A habit is a routine you perform, triggered by a certain cue, which then results in a reward for you. This routine consists of a sequence of actions which after some repetition requires almost no brain resources anymore. This is the reason why you, as a more or less experienced (non-automatic car) driver, are able to use the gearshift of your car AND at the same time see / react on every little detail happening on the street.

So we can summarize the habit loop as follows:

• Cue: Trigger which tells the brain to go into automatic mode starting with a predefined habit (think of a switch statement).
• Routine: Sequence of physical, mental or emotional actions.
• Reward: Tells your brain if this loop is actually worth remembering.

There are two major mean things to consider though.

Through the countless cues we are exposed to in our lives as well as the subliminal rewards we are provided with, our brains create habits without our consent, even without our knowledge!

The second nasty thing is that after some repetition cycles the pleasure response for a certain habit loop will shift its occurence to the moment immediately after the cue happens (and not when the reward is provided). Now imagine what would happen if the actual reward would be missing. That’s what craving is.

Example: When I arrive at the office at 7:55 am (cue) each morning I immediately go to (our really nice) chillout space, grab a nice cup of coffee and relax there for five minutes. Not being able to execute this habit and grab my reward due to the very rare occasion of an early morning client event would result in a grumpy me for the next few hours (For the record: I don’t consider this as a bad habit).

How can (bad) habits be changed?

Bad news first: You cannot make habits disappear.

Good news is though: You can change them. You can turn them into something so much better than they were before.

Think of the cue and the the craving you have as constants. Like tattoos in your brain. The cue will continue to trigger the brain and the (comparable) reward will be expected nevertheless.

Change the routine you must!

Charles Duhigg created a framework about how to tackle any bad habits and change them into something harmless, even good.

1. Identify the (bad) routine. That’s the easy part in most cases. Biting your nails, constantly checking your phone, overextended chatter with people in the gym instead of actually lifting weights, the list is endless. Sometimes however you might need to dig a little deeper to put the pieces together.
2. Find the actual craving you seek with the habit. Often we are not conscious of the cravings that drive our bad habits. So do a couple of test runs and replace the routines. Take a bad habit you’d like to change and force yourself to do something different instead (e.g. do a 30 second practice in coin knuckle rolling instead of biting your nails). If one of your adapted routines will not result in an urge to perform the original bad routine, you found your actual craving. The craving in the example above is just the physical sensation of doing something with your fingers.
3. Isolate the cue. These habit triggers can be attributed to in one of five categories: Location, time, emotional state, other people or immediatly preceding action. It can be tricky to find the guilty cue since millions of inputs affect us each day. Just take a couple of actual occurences of the habit loop and try to find out if there is a common denominator across those 5 categories, which caused you to do the routine. Be aware that the same bad routine can have different cues and another craving. E.g. being bored AND being nervous might trigger nail biting.
4. Inject a better routine in that filthy habit loop. Now that you exactly know what your bad habit is triggered by, what you do to get which reward (routine) and what you actually crave for, you can just replace the old routine with a better one. DON’T rush this. Make sure you are absolutely sure about point one to three, otherwise this won’t work. Be aware for the cues, actively do the better routine and your brain will be 100% satisfied. Voila, you altered your brain code.

Let me make an example: In my apartment, when I walked past the fridge, I had to open it and if possible eat something small. After doing step one to three I came up with the the following findings:

• Cue type: location (walking past the fridge)
• Routine: Open it and eat something
• Reward: Something to eat or at least to watch into the fridge.

However, my craving was not to defeat my hunger. I did it even when I was totally full with food. So after some tests I figured that I was just physically bored around the mouth region. So whenever I walked past the fridge I started to whistle. And it worked.

What can YOU do, starting today?

I read a lot about creating new habits and honestly, that’s great! However I am convinced that it is a good idea to start with looking at existing bad habits and fix them first. This way, other new good habits will have a much better foundation.

The nasty thing is, bad habits won’t just disappear. Also trying to defeat them by raw will power might not be very sustainable.

Take a few moments to think about your toxic routines. Is there something you’d like to get rid of? Be mindful in your daily life, recognize bad habits and note them down. You might also ask your significant other, your friends or your family. Sometimes we are blind for a lot of things so their input might be valuable.

After you have a decent list, take two or three and take your time to analyze them. Evaluate cues, routines, rewards and the underlying cravings. Then come up with a plan to replace this bad routine with a good one.

Execute the plan and repeat. Ask others for help or accountability if needed.

And one last thing: you really have to BELIEVE that you can do this. Have a strong mental picture in your head and you will succeed.

If you are interested in the topic around habits I encourage you to read more about this stuff. The book The power of habits by Charles Duhigg, which this article is heavily based upon, might be a good start.