The Power of Habits
“A habit cannot be tossed out the window; it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time.” - Mark Twain
“And once you understand that habits can change, you have the freedom and the responsibility to remake them.” - Charles Duhigg
Have you ever had a hard time breaking an existing long-term habit? Have you ever had difficulty in following through on a new goal in your life? If so, read on!
Before we start talking about why habits are so important and consequential in our lives, it would be helpful to agree on exactly what a habit is. Here is my working definition of a habit for the purposes of this blog and my coaching practice.
A habit is a routine of behavior that is repeated regularly and tends to occur subconsciously. The American Journal of Psychology defined a "habit, from the standpoint of psychology, [as] a more or less fixed way of thinking, willing, or feeling acquired through previous repetition of a mental experience."
A habit is a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up.
Using the metaphor of a computer gives us an illuminating way of thinking about habits. Imagine that your brain is the computer hardware, your mind is made up of the software programs that run the computer, and your body is the computer firmware. Firmware is software that never changes and runs behind the scenes of your computer. Your computer’s operating system (bios) is stored in firmware. Firmware is software that has been turned into hardware. It runs automatically when called (or triggered) by the computer and it runs much faster than a program in software.
Habits are software programs that have been turned into firmware and are stored in your body. You don’t have to think about something that has become a habit. Habits “execute” automatically and run very fast. Examples of some useful habits that most adult humans have programmed in their firmware include tying your shoelaces, riding a bike, brushing your teeth, typing, and driving your car (hopefully!)
So now that we have our definition, let’s explore why habits are so important in our lives and why we focus on them so much in coaching.
I would suggest that the quality of your life is directly proportional to the quality of your habits! The better your habits - the more consciously you choose and cultivate “good” habits - the more effective you will be in your life.
Rather than judging a habit as good or bad, I prefer to look at habits as either being useful to the effective functioning of your life or not useful. This way of thinking about habits allows for the understanding that some habits that were once useful in your life are no longer so useful. Time to get rid of those obsolete habits and replace them with more useful ones!
Useful habits are essential to our health, well-being, and effectiveness in our lives. They can make or break your chances of achieving and maintaining your goals such as sticking to an eating plan, exercising regularly, and managing chronic health conditions, along with increasing your quality of life and promoting longevity.
As much as useful habits help us live more effective and fulfilling lives, “bad” or NOT useful habits lead to just the opposite. According to Dr. Joe Dispensa in his bestselling book, “Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself” about 95% of who we are by midlife is a series of subconscious programs (habits) that have become automatic - overreacting when we're stressed, worrying about our future, judging our friends, complaining about our lives, blaming our parents, not believing in ourselves, and insisting on being chronically unhappy, just to name a few!
A Scientific Model for How New Habits are Formed UNCONSIOUSLY
According to Healthline.com, habits are actions that are triggered by cues, such as the time of day, an activity, or a location. They culminate in a feel-good reward (dopamine hit) that, through repetition, fuses the connection between cue and reward firmly in the brain.
Psychologists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) made a landmark discovery in 1999 of a cue-routine-reward feedback loop that journalist Charles Duhigg later coined “the habit loop” in his 2012 book “The Power of Habit.”
Here’s how the habit loop works:
Cue. You experience a stimulus — a trigger. It could be being in a certain location, smelling a certain smell, seeing a certain person, or feeling a particular emotional state, among many other possibilities.
Craving. The stimulus causes you to desire a particular outcome that you find rewarding. It motivates you to act.
Response. You engage in behaviors, thoughts, or actions you take to get that outcome.
Reward. The outcome occurs and you feel a sense of reward as a result, satisfying your craving. The pleasure or relief you experience reinforces the cue, making the cue even better at triggering craving next time. That’s why it’s an endless loop.
So if this is how our brains form habits UNCONSCIOUSLY, how do we go about forming new more useful habits CONSCIOUSLY?
The following science-backed techniques have been found to be helpful in eliminating unwanted habits and creating new more useful habits. The more of these techniques you use, the more successful you will be in reprogramming your firmware with new more useful habits. (some techniques adapted from an article posted on healthline.com by Stacy McLachlan)
Changing your Definition of Success
If your definition of success is meeting your goal 100%, you will almost always be disappointed. Think of the devastated Olympic athlete who is favored for the Gold, but ends up with the Silver breaking down in tears of grief. It is more useful to redefine your definition of success to be PROGRESS. If you have made any progress toward your goal, you have been successful. As long as you keep making PROGRESS towards your goal over time, you will definitely arrive at your desired destination.
Finding an Accountability Partner
Most of us are more accountable to others than we are to ourselves. If we want to create a new habit or achieve a new goal, it is often helpful to enroll someone as our accountability partner. If you want to start working out at the gym regularly, one of the best ways to do this is to find a workout buddy. If you want to go on a new diet, it is helpful to enlist your family in supporting you. We are much more likely to get up early (even though we had a few the night before), lace those shoes up, and go out running in the rain if we know that our running buddy is out there waiting for us!
Positive Affirmations
Positive affirmations may have acquired a dubious reputation, but saying your goals out loud to yourself does actually make you more likely to do them, and it may help increase your sense of self-worth too. Dr. Tom Kannon, a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner, says that when people have undergone brain scans while saying positive affirmations, the brain “lights up like a Christmas tree.” “Your brain truly wants to believe everything you’re saying,” he says.
Swap a new habit for an old one
Instead of going cold turkey, it’s far more effective to start replacing or adjusting small parts of the habituated action. If you always sit down with your glass of wine at 6 PM, for instance, keep the time and the glassware, but swap out the alcohol for a sparkling water.
Aim small (to start!)
There’s nothing wrong with big, audacious goals. But there need to be smaller, bite-sized milestones along the way. Accomplishing even a tiny goal can offer enough of a dopamine kick to reinforce behavior and boost you to the next step. Once you have your bite-size habit ingrained — say, committing to meditating, starting with the goal of 5 minutes a day — it’s easy to expand as you need to.
Add on to an existing routine
Habit stacking, as popularized by James Clear in his book “Atomic Habits,” takes the mini-habit idea one step further. Take a habit you already practice, and add on one little positive thing to your routine, like doing calf raises while you brush your teeth. If you take a snack break at 11 AM every day, why not walk around the block at the same time?
Create a plan that plays to your strengths
If you’re a visual or spatial person, build new habits around the format that works best for you. If you want to take up meditating, for instance, and the audio apps aren’t working for you, seek out a program with visual guidance instead. If your goal is to read a book a week, but you’re having trouble sitting still and focusing on your novel, download the audiobook and “read” while you stroll your neighborhood.
Change your language
Metacognition is thinking about the way we think, including how we use language. If the way you talk about exercise is, “I hate it, it’s hard, it hurts,” then you’re probably not going to crave that experience. Reframing your perspective as something positive that makes you feel powerful and happy (even if it’s challenging!) is going to help compel you to get moving. Even if you don’t believe it at first, “faking it till you make it” will wire neurons together to eventually create the genuine reaction you were forcing at first.
Visualize success
As any sports psychologist can tell you, visualization is an incredible tool for reaching your goals. Even if your goal is to run 1 mile without stopping rather than win the Boston Marathon, it can have an impact. Studies show that whether you’re thinking about shooting free throws or actually shooting them, similar neurons are firing in your brain — and creating those feel-good pathways with visualization can help motivate you to get up and get out to the gym.
Set up the right cues in your environment
A 2018 review of research found that environmental pressures can be more powerful than your will to achieve a goal. In other words, change your environment to change your habits. So if you want to create a new habit like, “Be more mindful,” instead of trying to achieve it with sheer willpower, create a tangible cue to link it to. For instance, you could leave a pen and gratitude journal on your bedside table. Then, every night before you go to bed, you’ll see it, pick it up, and write down what you’re grateful for. The point is this: You may be more likely to maintain this habit when you’re prompted by seeing the journal compared with just having the goal in mind. This can help you make diet changes, too. That’s why many nutritionists recommend strategically stocking your kitchen so that healthy snacks are readily available on the counter or in the cupboards, while less nutritious foods are in a less visible place. In doing this, you’re actively changing your environment, making it much easier to avoid cues for habits you want to break (like seeing the cookie jar), and incorporating cues into your environment for the habits you want to make (like grabbing an apple).
Give yourself a break
Whether you’re trying to build a new positive habit or shake an old habit you don’t like, patience is vital. Yes, there are people out there who can just go cold turkey with a negative habit. But the reality is, they’re very rare. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that most people who smoke try to quit smoking 8 to 11 times before they break the habit for good. Be kind to yourself as you try to break a pattern. Falling back into a habit doesn’t mean you’ve failed. “Instead of thinking of yourself as a failure, reframe setbacks as, ‘I didn’t succeed that time, but I can still try again”