Build better habits
We all know that bad habits can hold us back, but did you also know that great habits can launch you into a whole new stratosphere of success?
In this article, I explain the ins and outs of habits and offer practical examples for replacing your most annoying habits with ones that optimise your effectiveness. I wonder what you might be able to achieve with this solid foundation in place…
Set yourself up for success
From an evolutionary standpoint, habits bring you ease. As they quietly tick away in the background, you can attend to a myriad of details in your life and make better decisions, more efficiently.
Habits form through repetition, so they take time to build — but once ingrained, habits are incredibly persistent. While this can be frustrating when a habit does not serve you, the enduring quality of habits also provides an opportunity. As author of Atomic Habits, James Clear, puts it,
“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest; the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them.”
If you think back to a time when you learned a new skill, you can appreciate the compounding effect of habits. Can you recall learning to ride a bike?
At first, you would have felt shaky; your feet sliding all over the pedals, hands gripping the handle-bars, white-knuckled. Pedalling would have been jerky and braking more about minimising injury than slowing to a graceful halt. For a long time, you would’ve felt like a loose-cannon, hurtling down a path with close to zero control of your balance, speed or ability to shift direction let alone gears.
Then one day it would have clicked. Just like that. Why? Because, each time you got on the bike, you gave your foot the opportunity to find the right spot on the pedal, your hands learned to rest gently on the handle-bars, your centre of gravity adjusted, your spatial awareness developed, your muscles strengthened and so on and so on.
Over time, miniscule adjustments become automatic so you can keep adding layers of improvement, until... one day you find yourself gliding down a cycle path, overtaking traffic, sweating up a hill and coasting down the other side, discovering a whole new world. You are a confident and competent cyclist because of the compounding effect of habits.
Understand how habits form
Habits cycle through four simple steps, as shown below. This diagram is inspired by explanations of habit formation in James Clear’s book Atomic Habits and Dr Sarah McKay’s instruction at The Neuroscience Academy.
Cues trigger your habit loop. They take the form of a specific time, location, person, activity or feeling. Your habit can be cued by experiences as varied as the bleep of a morning alarm, opening your laptop, greeting a lover or throwing your leg over a bicycle. Cues cause you to anticipate and crave a reward.
It is this craving that sits at the heart of habits. Your brain is designed to seek equilibrium, so once the craving begins you will naturally sniff out ways to satisfy it. When you hit on a routine that relieves your craving, your brain rewards you by releasing the feel-good chemical dopamine.
If you repeat this cycle often enough (cue → craving → routine → reward), your brain will encode the routine so it becomes your default response to the cue. Thus, a habit is formed.
Map your current habits
The first step to shifting a habit is cultivating self-awareness. This requires you to identify and observe your habit without judgement, including labelling it as good or bad. Simply notice the facts of your behaviour.
Ask yourself: What is cueing your habit? What are you craving?
Mapping your observations (as in the examples below) can illuminate aspects of your behaviour you hadn’t noticed before. For instance, you might become aware of a spike in stress levels or boredom accompanying your cue. Zen Habits blogger Leo Babauta cites stress and boredom as the most common catalysts of undesirable habits.
When you are aware of each step in your habit loop, you are better equipped to change or make the most of it in the future.
Introduce fabulous new habits
You can design habits to your liking by harnessing four powerful principles. Pick a habit you would like to adopt and ask yourself:
How can I make the cue obvious?
How can I make the habit irresistible?
How can I make the habit easy?
How can I make the habit satisfying?
The inverse works for breaking bad habits. You can ask yourself how to make the cue invisible and the habit unattractive, difficult and unsatisfying.
While this is a fantastic framework for designing new habits, there are layers beneath its simple veneer. To answer the four questions persuasively, you need to understand your motivation for wanting to create change and skills for accomplishing this. This is where working with a coach can come in handy. Together you can examine your motivation and abilities — and devise ways to increase both to successfully implement new habits in your life.
Get feedback
Are you trying to break or build a habit? Get in touch!