Part 1: Diving into the Habit Creation Process
Photo by Erik Dungan on Unsplash
For much of this path, I’ll be drawing on “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg and “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. I highly recommend both these books to anyone looking to learn more about the actual process of building habits - they are excellent and easy to read. But for those looking for a quicker read, I will be distilling the core advice from those books here. Let’s go over some of the central components of habits and dispel some common misconceptions about how they work.
Aristotle: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
Habits are achieved through consistent 1% changes.
Whether your goals are big or small, the method for building habits is the same: slow, incremental, persistent effort. Lasting change is achieved not through sudden and dramatic jumps but slow and steady crawls. It’s all about repeating the behavior or action you want to pick up - the important part is that you are consistent with it. Building habits like healthy eating or learning to play an instrument are only cemented in your brain when done repeatedly for long periods of time. This means that sticking to the habit only when you’re feeling motivated or have a burst of energy won’t cut it. But the powerful side of habits is that if you do stick to them, those 1% improvements with each iteration will not only become automatic, they will compound to create enormous change over time.
Think of it like learning how to drive a car. The first time you drive, especially on a fast highway or busy street, you may struggle and require intense focus. After several months of driving, controlling a car comes easily, even on fast and busy roads. After several years of driving, it’s so easy and thoughtless you can do it without even really thinking. But if when you were still learning you only drove once every few weeks, or you tried learning how to drive for a month and then gave up because you weren’t a great driver yet, then you’d never reach that no-effort stage. The same is true for any habit: by doing something repeatedly and frequently, the behavior becomes almost automatic.
image from Laxmena
Cues can be used when first starting a habit - brush your teeth immediately after getting dressed, go to the gym at exactly 7 pm, when you’re hungry for ice cream you eat an apple instead, etc. - to help jumpstart the “routine” (the habit). Rewards can be used the same way - only drink coffee if you first brushed your teeth that morning, don’t eat dinner until after you go to the gym, if you eat an apple every day you’ll get ice cream on Saturday’s, etc. - to similarly reinforce habits. Note that cues/rewards don’t have to be physical things - they can be mental/emotional, such as the feeling of pride or joy simply from doing the routine. Using these cues and rewards will wire your brain to actually desire the habit itself, through association with the cue and desire for the reward. Eventually, the routine/habit itself will become automatic, and you’ll be doing it without even needing a cue or reward. The method of triggering and reinforcing habits with cues and rewards is often called the cue-routine-reward loop, or simply the habit loop. It’s the centerpiece of habit building, so I’ll be referencing it often.
2. Change does not come all at once, but through steady progress.
We often only see the results of hard work, and we don’t notice changes in others until there is a dramatic difference. This leads to the mistaken thinking that someone “suddenly got in shape” or “suddenly mastered a new skill”. The reality is that almost any big change is preceded by a long, persistent effort that may not have paid off for some time. This can often be true for physical changes - runners or weight lifters need to put in months of work before seeing real and significant results. Any fitness video that promises you abs in a month or less is, unfortunately, lying (abs can take at least 6 months of healthy eating and exercising, depending on your starting condition, and they become visible very, very slowly). It’s also true for mental or emotional changes, like studying a new subject or re-framing your mindset. Anything or anyone that promises you a quick fix or low-effort process is playing on your desire for instant gratification. While this may sound harsh, it’s better to realize that hard work and discipline are what build habits. Easy shortcuts either won’t work or won’t last.
The takeaway here is that you should not expect immediate or sudden changes when you decide to pick up a habit or learn a new skill. In fact, not only should you expect it to be a slow and (especially at the start) difficult process, but be prepared for failures and missteps and even moments of regression along the way. If you look at the history of a star athlete or famous celebrity before their current success, you’ll often find a trail of failure - hundreds of bad games or dozens of bad roles in unknown movies. It’s only the perseverance of these people, and their ability to learn from their failures (and probably some lucky breaks), that allows them to one day “suddenly” shine through.
There are, of course, exceptions to this rule - people who really do get abs in a month or pick up a new skill with little effort. But these cases are exactly that, exceptions, and you shouldn’t let those individual stories misguide you or discourage you from your own potentially slower results. For the vast majority of people with the vast majority of habits, the key to success is steady progress.
3. Focus on systems, not goals.
While goals are necessary for keeping you moving in the right direction, and they can certainly help with motivation, focusing on results instead of the work itself will often hurt more than help your efforts. This is because, as I wrote above, progress is not made immediately or even steadily. The first few weeks or months of building a habit might yield no improvement, and if you’re focused on the results you’ll be quickly discouraged. Not only that, but if you have a specific goal and then achieve it, you may then struggle to keep the habit going. This is often true with diets people use with the goal of losing weight. Once they drop those 20 pounds they set as their goal, they go back to their old unhealthy eating or exercising habits and gain them back. 90% of people who try out diets gain back their weight. If instead, you focus on setting up healthy eating habits and making exercise a part of your routine, you’re much more likely to stay with that routine and actually achieve your weight loss goal.
So focusing only on goals makes it harder to start a habit and to continue it long-term. Goals work better as secondary objectives, with the system itself as your primary target. Then you can use goals to motivate you in short-term bursts, while the habit feedback loop keeps you disciplined even in the more difficult moments. The best way to use goals is also to repeatedly envision the specific results you want to achieve from the habit so that you establish a craving that strengthens the habit itself.
4. Internalize responsibility.
How you think about yourself and your habits has a major effect on the habits you keep or lose. Think “I’m someone who exercises” or “I don’t smoke”, instead of “I want to exercise” or “I want to stop smoking”. Your thoughts shape your actions, and your current thoughts shape your future thoughts/beliefs. When you start seeing yourself as the person you wish to be, it’s easier to do the things that such a person would do. A piano player practices piano every day, an author spends time writing, a sober person doesn’t drink. Obviously, there are limits to this, as your thoughts alone aren’t enough to make a habit a reality. But you would be surprised how much a shift in the way you think about yourself actually makes it easier to stick to your habits.
Who you see yourself as is very much the result of your habits. So as you work more on building the habits you want, this will become easier and easier. You may feel silly thinking “I’m a basketball player” when you’ve never touched a basketball. But if you start out thinking “I play basketball” instead of “I want to start playing basketball”, then you’re already priming yourself as someone who practices basketball. As you slowly improve your dribbling and shooting skills, you lean more into the identity, and soon you really can see yourself as a basketball player. Habits and identity form a positive feedback loop, and by working on both your habit and your identity, you make change that much easier.
image by Laxmena
5. Bad habits can be overwritten by good habits.
Sadly, everything I’ve written above applies just as much to bad habits as good habits. If you believe “I’m someone who procrastinates” or “I’m always late to things”, well then, you’re going to confirm those beliefs with your actions. That means breaking out of bad habits is tough since they can become so ingrained not only in our actions but also in our thinking and perceptions of ourselves. Frustratingly, many of our bad habits are also part of our natural behavior due to years of being repeated. We may snack every time we’re stressed or go on our phones instead of picking up a book when we’re bored without even consciously deciding to do those things.
The good news is that these bad habits can be replaced by good habits. Using the advice in this map - cue-reward incentives, focusing on systems, identity-based thinking - will help construct desired habits in the place of long-standing unwanted ones. But this requires...(say it with me) long-term and consistent effort. Only through hard work and discipline can you overwrite a bad habit.