All of us have times where we forget to do something or just don’t feel like it. Forming habits is one important way to start doing the things that we need to do consistently. But why do habits work and how do we form them?
When we talk to other about our lives, we often talk about big events: vacations, weddings, or promotions. But in reality, it is the things that we do everyday, those uneventful moments, that define us. Small changes in how we live our lives everyday over the long term can lead to larger changes than almost any single event can. These everyday changes are ruled by habits.
Habits can be
defined at a scientific level as a process in which we can act impulsively in response to a stimulus, requiring little to no conscious decision-making. But a more useful way of looking at habits for the layman is to look to how Charles Duhigg, writer of
The Power of Habit, defines its three-step process: the cue, the routine, and the reward.
A cue is the context in which habits happen. They can come from your environment or even your preceding actions. For example, most people brush their teeth at night. In this case, dinner or going to bed might be the cue.
Next is the routine, what it is that you do, such as brushing your teeth or going out for a run.
Finally, we reap the rewards. In good habits, these rewards are positive over the long run, getting in better health or maintaining oral hygiene. But in bad habits, these rewards might be a quick dopamine hit of watching a useless youtube video, or smoking a cigarette.
Habits are useful because they can be powerful tool to thwart the dips in motivation that we all experience. This is because habits become impulsive and automatic, meaning that they are less dependent on our motivation to do the task.
Before creating habits, however, we have to decide what we are striving for. It has been known for a long time that when people feel like they are just following others, they give
less consistent and prolonged effort. On the other hand, when they feel like they are the initiator of action, when they feel that they have agency, they have more resilience to push through periods of discomfort.
To create new habits, we can start a routine based around a naturally occurring cue, such as right after we get up or before we eat dinner. These then serve as a reminder of the routine that you want to perform.
However, the process to get rid of old habits is much harder. Duhigg’s Golden Rule of Habit Change says that “You can’t extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it.” Instead, we need to break our habits into the three steps and only replace the routine, keeping the cue and the reward.
For example, I have a bad habit of getting distracted as soon as I get on the computer (cue), often opening up youtube (routine) and giving me a dopamine rush (reward). These habits that give you a dopamine rush are the hardest to get rid of. Now, when I get on the computer, I try to get the simplest task on my to-do list done. I still get a similar dopamine rush, and I have a positive momentum going further to do more tasks.