As it’s still early in the new year, it seemed like a good time to reread Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business for a reminder of how to go about changing bad habits, or establishing new good ones. Habits have the power to free up our mental processes to allow us to get things done without constantly having to make the same decisions over and over again, but if we allow a bad habit to get established it can lead to a struggle as we have to actively work to avoid and change the habit to prevent the bad behavior from continuing in our lives. As the books’ introduction points out, we likely have far more habits than we are aware of:
“All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits,” William James wrote in 1892. 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.
Without habits and routines we’d never be able to get anything done, having to constantly make the same decisions each day, what to have for breakfast, which route to take to work. Habits allow our brains to go into a sort of autopilot, leaving us the more important decisions to make. While habits are essential for our daily functioning, if we are not careful, we can also end up with bad habits, as they can easily form without us noticing, until it is too late. The key to any habit is the habit loop, as Duhigg explains:
This process within our brains is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future.
To establish a new habit, we likely already know the routine we would like to accomplish, so to help motivate ourselves and to establish the habit, we should choose a reward for accomplishing the routine, such as a smoothie after a workout. Then all that is needed is a cue to trigger the habit, so to continue with the workout example, as soon as you get home from work, you will workout, then reward yourself with a smoothie. By following this habit loop, over time it will become ingrained and automatic.
To change an existing habit, the routine is generally already known, so the cue and the reward must then be identified. Once we know the cue that causes us to execute the habit, and the reward that we are seeking from it, through a conscious effort, we can work to shift the routine when we see the cue. By keeping the cue and the reward the same, we modify the existing habit, instead of having to completely erase, or establish new habits, which can be much more challenging.
While most people are likely more concerned about correcting their bad habits than establishing news ones, having positive habits in our lives can lead to changes in our other habits as well. Another interesting book on habits and routines, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey opens with an explanation of the importance of routine for people in creative fields:
The book’s title is Daily Rituals, but my focus in writing it was really people’s routines. The word connotes ordinariness and even a lack of thought; to follow a routine is to be on autopilot. But one’s daily routine is also a choice, or a whole series of choices. In the right hands, it can be a finely calibrated mechanism for taking advantage of a range of limited resources: time (the most limited resource of all) as well as willpower, self-discipline, optimism. A solid routine fosters a well-worn groove for one’s mental energies and helps stave off the tyranny of moods. This was one of William James’s favorite subjects. He thought you wanted to put part of your life on autopilot; by forming good habits, he said, we can “free our minds to advance to really interesting fields of action.” Ironically, James himself was a chronic procrastinator and could never stick to a regular schedule.
Artists are typically pictured as free-spirited people, that work when they are inspired; but in order to consistently create quality work many rely on a routine to keep themselves working each day, whether they are really feeling inspired or not.
Finally, I was reminded of a wonderful quote from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, in which he points out how quickly we can fall into a new habit or routine, or end up following the paths of others with very little thought.
I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.
The malleability of both the earth and our brains are quite similar in this regard, we can quickly wear a path which we follow without thinking and once established find it takes more effort to clear a new path than it did to create the original. By observing what causes us to fall into a habit loop, and the reward we receive at the end of it, over time we can change our bad habits for the better. Or, by carefully choosing appropriate rewards and easy to follow triggers, establish new good habits. It all relies on the deliberate observation and planning of our own habit loops.