How to Use Habits to Your Advantage
We all have our habits, for better or for worse. We tend to define them as good habits or as bad habits, depending on what we want to achieve. I personally found and still find habits enormously helpful and important. When I am successful at something, I can nail it down to my habit culture and the same when I fail. When I fail, I tend to find that my habits were lacking (yes often it comes down to attributes like perseverance and discipline, but also those need good habits). Let’s have a look at habits and deconstruct this wonderful tool and understand it.
How does habit formation work? Can we actively influence the process? Can we get rid of “bad” habits? Are habits important for our success, when facing adversity?
What Are Habits Good for?
Habits are talked about everywhere. Everyone is trying to build good habits and get some great routines going (routines are not to be confused with habits!). But why are habits so important? Well, the principle behind building good habits is also a popular investment theme: compound interest. A good habit that you perform every day, will lead to small improvements on a daily basis. The typical example is that you try to improve yourself by 1% each day, which will lead to an improvement of about 37 times in a year. This is the power behind daily habits or daily routines. The rate of improvement is astonishing. It is important to note, that this goes along an exponential curve, thus the improvements are minute at the start. My favorite proverb to picture this is: “You can achieve less in a year than you think, but more in 3 years than you think”. If you diligently work on something, improvement will come with time. Long term success is usually built by good habits and insane repetition. It takes 10 000 hours of doing something to become an expert in it. The reason we become better is, because the more we do something, the more our body invests in the infrastructure for the task. Our neural pathways are steadily improved and increased in size, the more we repeat something.
Compound interest: A good habit that you perform every day, will lead to small improvements on a daily basis. Improving yourself by 1% each day, which will lead to an improvement of about 37 times (per year).
Habits become especially important if you are hitting adversity of any kind. When we perform a habit, we are on autopilot and thus act subconsciously (a routine is typically conscious for example). This means, that we do not need to use much willpower to perform the action. In a crisis scenario, we are usually under time pressure and high stress, thus we need to conserve as much willpower as we can. If you have good habits that keep you healthy, you will perform better under such circumstances. Moreover, actions that are already a habit are quicker and easier to carry out. The more “good” habits you have incorporated into your life, the more you can get done in less time. This does not only apply on you personally. The more positive habits a team or company adheres by, the better they will perform in a crisis of any kind.
Another reason why good habits are so important, is that they lead to even more good habits. It is all about momentum. Once you start you incorporate more and more positive habits into your life, you will change your environment (we will cover this later). This change will lead to more positive changes and habits. This is a self-reinforcing cycle. The dangerous part about this is that it goes both ways. Meaning that it is easy to slip into times of bad habits. I have been through times full of good habits and times full of bad habits. For me this comes in waves. For every period of great habits there is a period of bad ones. The trick is to try and grow with every “downturn” and try to make the good phases last longer and the bad ones shorter.
Another important aspect of habits is how they can help you get into flow. To enter a flow state when doing work, the work should be roughly 4% more difficult than what you are capable of. At least that is the sweet spot according to research. Now, a state of flow is by its mechanics not much different to a habit. It can be triggered by a cue, like a habit can. Moreover, you will be using both your subconscious and conscious mind during a state of flow, switching forth and back. The same goes for habits and deliberate actions. If you train habits to aid you during your flow states and if you train habits to get you into flow state, you will increase its efficiency by quite a bit. I personally have developed certain habits that get me into a flow state, just like a sports person, who has a strange warm up routine. These habits get me into the mood for peak performance.
How Does Habit Formation Work?
As you can probably guess, our brain is mostly responsible for forming habits. In essence there is a 4-step loop to forming habits, also known as the “habit loop”. In the diagram below you can see that the habit loop starts with a cue. This cue then triggers a feeling of craving, which leads to an action or response. And finally we receive the reward, whatever that may be. Looks simple right? In reality there are a bunch of neurological processes, neurotransmitters and what not involved. If you repeat this cycle often enough a new habit forms. Depending on each of the four steps a habit forms faster or slower. Large rewards tend turn into a habit faster, the same goes for obvious cues and easy actions. Last but not least it depends on how large the feeling of craving is, usually in relation to the reward that is expected.
Let’s take a simple habit as an example, one we probably all fight with these days. You hear your mobile phone buzzing (that is the cue), you will immediately have a sense of craving to check what the buzz is all about. The craving leads to you picking up the phone (the response) and checking the screen. This will then calm you down again as you have satisfied your craving. While at the same time missing a few seconds of the conversation you might be sitting in. No one will have seen you, right? And you will not have missed anything of importance, or have you? I think we all know the situation. In this case the “good” feeling of checking your phone is immediately followed by a bad feeling, precisely for the same action. Maybe you are angry at yourself, or you feel ashamed. Zapping you of precious energy for the day, by playing an emotional tugging war.
The Habit Loop: 4-step loop to forming habits
What goes on in our brain? We are constantly on the look out for cues to rewards. This is wired into us from prehistoric times, when foraging for food. Cues were important signs to show us where we could get food from. These days primary rewards, such as food are easy to come by, thus we spend most of our time on the search for secondary rewards, such as money, love, fame etc. Once we identify a cue, craving (our internal motivation) is triggered. In an already introduced habit, your dopamine will spike in anticipation of a future reward. This feeling will drive you to complete the needed action to reach your reward. Originally, when the habit was built, the dopamine spike was only experienced when receiving the reward.
Dopamine is also known as our excitement neurotransmitter, which is released by any “positive” event. When we laugh for example or when we take certain drugs, such as coffee. Once a habit is cemented, you will not experience a dopamine spike in the reward phase. This can be a reason, for “self-reinforcing” habits. For example, why people who are addicted to sugar, will continually up their intake. Our brain is rooted to constantly analyse if a reward is worth getting. In other words, if we carry out an action and receive a reward from it, the brain assesses how difficult it was to carry out the action and if the received reward was large enough in comparison to it. This is another important mechanic for habit formation. Only actions that are easy enough to perform tend to be registered as worth performing again. Broken down, rewards satisfy our cravings, and they teach us which action are worth remembering.
In “The Talent Code” Dan Coyle covers the role myelin plays in learning. Myelin also plays a role in habit formation. It is a component that acts as an insulator for our neural pathways. Any new action leads to new neural pathways being built. Imagine them like a small path that you can walk on. With increasing usage this pathway is steadily increased in size. This is done by the body wrapping more and more myelin around the pathways. Actions that are repeated a huge number of times, will have very thick pathways to correspond to. Picture the pathway becoming a highway at some point. This is also a reason why it is very difficult to get rid of a bad habit, that you have repeated times and times again. “Forgetting” a small path in the forest is much easier than forgetting a large highway. Later on, we will have a look at how we can leverage myelin to our advantage.
How Do We Form Good Habits?
Now that we know how habits are formed in general, we can try to deconstruct methods to form habits, that we consciously want to have. Quite a bit of research has been done on this and there are a few great books out there on this topic. I for my part have read “Atomic Habits” by James Clear, “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg and “The Talent Code” by Dan Coyle.
Looking back at the habit loop we can try to tweak each step to its maximum effect. James Clear also offers a neat cheat sheet, with tips on how to effectively create good habits. Basically, there are four easy rules to keep in mind:
1) Make It Obvious – Make It Invisible
Everything starts with awareness. In this case you need to get aware of the habits that you perform. Some will be positive; some will be negative and some neutral. Again, if a habit is positive or not, depends on the goals you have. Start by auditing your days and see which good and bad habits you already have. From there you can decide, if there are any you want to get rid off and some that you want to strengthen, build upon or add. This becomes important, especially as you can use an existing habit as a cue for a new one. The end of one habit becomes the trigger for the next. This is a really helpful way, that I like to use a lot. Building habits on top of each other is not only easier but time effective.
Habit stacking is a step towards the next method, which is to build your environment for effective habit implementation. Environment is everything. You will probably have heard that “you are the average of the 5 people you surround yourself with the most”. If all your friends smoke and you are trying to quit, you will have a hard time. This applies to anything. If you try to stop watching TV, but you have a cable connection with a TV at home, and your couch faces the TV, you will watch TV. Easy solution is to change your environment and remove the TV. If you want to build a habit like doing 10 kettlebell swings every time you go to the toilet, well then you put the kettlebell in front of the toilet door (this gets suggested in the book “The Urban Monk”). This way you make the cue very obvious as you literally stumble upon it. If you do not find a habit to stack another habit on top of, be very specific about the habit. Write it out and write down the specific cue. For example, I will do my timesheet at 17:30 at my office desk.
2) Make It Attractive – Make It Unattractive
We spoke earlier about it. You want to create a craving. We want a habit to be attractive, so the body craves its reward. Change the environment is a key again, but this time not the physical but the cultural environment. So back to the smoking habit. If you really want to stop and it is important to you, you need to change your circle of close friends. If none of them smoke, it will be unattractive to smoke. If you want to start doing something, look for a culture where this is the norm. Want to be sportive? Join a sports club and spend time with people you like there.
You can bundle a habit you want to do with a habit you already enjoy. For example, you can make a pact with yourself, that you are not allowed your morning coffee unless you read 10 pages in the morning. Assuming you really love your habit of morning coffee, you now have great motivation to read. Ritualize a habit. Hype yourself up. I sometimes use songs. I chose a song I really like, and I play the song every time before I am about to perform a habit that I am having difficulty with building. After a few times the song will get you motivated, and you get into the mood to perform said habit.
3) Make It Easy – Make It Difficult
Any habit you want to build should be easy for you to perform. Once you get into an easy habit, you can start to build upon it. If you want to lose a habit, make it hard to do. For example, if you want to go to the gym every day, chose a gym which you walk past of on the way home from the office. Its on your route and easy. While if you chose some fancy gym somewhere out of your way, it becomes and extra chore to go there.
Start small. In the beginning try to make the habit not last longer than 2 minutes. This is a kind of psychological barrier. If it lasts longer than 2 minutes it becomes harder to do, below 2 minutes it is easy for you. You can also try to automate your habits. One simple trick is to set an alarm for certain habits. The alarm then becomes a cue and it is automated.
Another tip is to see if any one-time purchases can make a habit easier. A personal example: I currently do not use a wristwatch as I can just check the time on my phone (I used to in school back in the day though). After doing a habit audit I realized that I nearly always end up checking messages, emails or social media, every time I check the time. Solution? I got a wristwatch again. Now I check the time on my wristwatch (and it’s not an apple watch!) all I see is the time and nothing more. Another example: I wanted to build a habit of putting my glasses in the same place (you would be surprised how much time I spend looking for my glasses). My partner gifted me a wooden sculpture called Mr. Nose. As the name suggests it is a wooden nose, here you can put glasses on top. Now my glasses go on there and the problem is pretty much solved.
4) Make It Satisfying – Make It Unsatisfying
A habit needs a reward and preferably one that is satisfying. A habit you want to lose needs to be unsatisfying. The first step is to change your identity. Say to yourself and to other people “I do not smoke – I am a non-smoker”. Try to really feel that you are a non-smoker. This way you have already decided to stop smoking. If you say “I am trying to stop”, you suggest, that you still smoke and are considering to stop. Make those decisions.
Little actions can trigger a reward. For example, every time you perform a habit, track it. A famous method is the paper clip method. Have a jar of paper clips and an empty one next to it. Every time you successfully perform a habit you are trying to build, move a paper clip from one jar to the other.
If your habit is not so enjoyable, try and make it enjoyable by adding an extra reward to it. This is like training your dog. Every time you perform a habit, reward yourself. Every day you go to the gym you are allowed to watch another episode of one of your favourite tv shows.
Get an accountability partner to monitor your behaviour and keep you on track. Even more extreme is to sign a habit contract with someone, where you commit to “painful” punishments for not performing a habit or for performing one that you want to stop doing. This can be quite powerful, especially if you make it public. Be sure though the punishment is executed in some way, so you can not cheat. That’s why an accountability partner to play executioner is key.
Keystone Habits and Leveraging Myelin To Your Advantage
For those of you who are trying to use habits to introduce some major change into your life or company, you will need to decide where to start. One cannot introduce too many habits at once, as that would be too difficult. But where to start? There are so called keystone habits. A keystone habit is the first stone you set for a bunch of habits that often follow. For example, if people who want to get fit, lose weight and generally be healthier, there are many avenues to start. But where is best to start? Studies found that a food diary is a great habit to start. Again, it all begins with awareness. Look for habits that create awareness for the problems. A keystone habit is the first step to changing your environment. In our example a food diary will lead to you cutting out foods, changing diet, doing sport and many more things. Say you want to become more effective at work, a keystone habit can be, that you start to note down what you work on and how much time you spend on what. This will create the needed awareness to introduce other habits.
We mentioned myelin earlier and its importance in making habits stick. The thicker your neural pathways the stronger a habit gets. There are in general 4 ways to do this. The first is repetition and as we discussed it “just” takes you 10 000 hours to become an expert. There are three smarter ways of kick-starting myelin production though.
The first is by using intensity. The more intense an event is, the faster the body learns. Put simple: anything that creates enough stress will make sure that more myelin is created. This is a mechanism for the body to learn fast. In theory the most effective situations are near death events. That is one reason why these events have the biggest impact on us. Whatever you learn at such an event, will be stuck with you forever. Our brain makes sure of that by wrapping the neural pathways created in that event with enormous amounts of myelin. Try and create intense events where you perform new habits. Extreme emotions can be used to achieve this.
The second way is to use focus. If you focus on a task that you want to make into a habit, you can speed up myelin production. By focusing on things, they will slip from working memory into the long-term memory. That is why some habits build faster than others; why you sometimes remember seemingly unimportant event for the rest of your life. You were focusing on something at the time, which means that all the information around it gets stored into long term memory.
The third method - something that is used in sports a lot - is that myelin is also created faster when we correct mistakes. In sprint training for example this is leveraged to teach people good body posture faster. You will have them do one sprint with a terribly wrong posture and then right afterwards they need to do a sprint the correct way. I love to make athletes (when I am a coach in my free time) sprint with their feet pointed extremely inwards our outwards and then correctly. The results are amazing. People learn really quickly to do it correctly. In short: Make conscious mistakes and correct them right away. This way you burn the habit faster into your brain.
Habits Are Not Eternal
We talked about how useful habits are. However, I want to warn you about their downsides. You need to constantly question your habits. With changing goals and changing circumstances does the usefulness of habits change. You need to constantly evaluate and re-evaluate what you do, when you do it and how you do it. Also keep an open mind. If we get focused too much on habits and doing the same thing over and over again, we will get blind to new and better ways. There is always room for improvement. At a company level you especially need to watch habits of the workforce. Things like “we always did it this way” or general toxic behaviour are things that should never be accepted. Habits are great as long as things stay predictable. The moment you enter uncertain territory your habits can become a liability. The more habits you have and the more you move within a certain comfort zone through your habits, the harder uncertainty will hit you. In short, be vigilant, never stop asking questions, never cease improving and always prepare for the worst.
Wrapping It All Up
In my personal experience a crisis will act as a catalyst for habit change. This can go in both directions. For me personally there is usually a point when my habits break down and it becomes chaos and from there, I will rebuild my habits. Each crisis will stress test you and your habits. Use this as a chance to improve them and use the extra stress to strengthen the habits. Many currently reading this might be stuck at home with your family 24/7 and need to work around this. There are some very good resources out there to help you build great habits and routines.
