What are habits?
What are habits and what do they mean for us all?
In simple terms, habits are a built-in tendency for our brains to repeat things that we’ve done before. Habits save brain space as we don’t have to think about what we need to do all of the time.
Habits must be triggered so firstly you have to consciously do it and remind yourself to do it and then with enough practice it can then become ‘unconscious’ which means that you get used to doing something so much that you do it automatically as a habit. This means that we can do things that we want to do without little effort and willpower. This works even when we’re exhausted as willpower is a limited resource.
40% of our daily actions are habits
60% of our daily actions are intentional.
When on a diet you get to the end of the day and willpower is low and you give in, for example, you might say ‘have that big bar of chocolate or that take away meal’, however habits allow us to run on autopilot and to do a lot of the good behaviours that we want to do even when willpower is very low.
The habit loop
Trigger- A reminder, be it conscious or subconscious that initiates the behaviour. An example of a trigger: seeing your gym clothes reminds you that you’re going to get changed into it, go to the gym and that you’re going to exercise.
Action- The behaviour itself, the action you take.
The reward- This is the benefit that you gain from doing the habit.
An example of this concept is:
Trigger: You see your toothbrush
Action: You clean your teeth
Reward: You have a nice and clean mouth.
If the behaviour is positive then the desire to repeat the behaviour will be reinforced every time you see the trigger.
What we mean by saying positive also doesn’t necessarily mean positive in a way that we might deem it as eating cakes may feel positive to your brain, however it might not be a positive action towards your diet.
It varies wildly depending on the habit that you’re trying to implement and the person who is trying to implement it but it takes anywhere between 18-254 days of a conscious effort to reinforce a habit before you can push it into an unconscious habit so habits take time to work on.
The anatomy of a trigger has 4 features
Building habits:
Must be frequent- they have to be performed in a consistent control and something that you can do frequently on a daily basis.
Must be automatic- they take little to no effort and it’s got to be things that you can do on autopilot.
Must be triggered- something gets triggered and all the actions necessary for a habit just start falling into place.
Must be conscious- Habits take place almost entirely below our level of awareness. Both triggering and the action.
For example- You’re driving your car into work, you get in the car, you start driving to work and before you know it, you have got to work and you haven’t even realised that you have driven because it has been subconsciously and you have been on autopilot the whole time.
Designing habits 5 principles
Obvious
Frequent
Triggered
Personalisable to you
Under your control
Obvious: The closer the habit links to your goals then the more likely you are to follow through on it. The more complicated something is the less likely we are to feel in control of it and again this lowers your chance of following through so make it simple so for example, is it something as simple as eating a portion of vegetables at each meal?
Is it obvious enough? So if you told your habit to a family member or a friend then would they understand why this habit would help you achieve your goal?
This is how obvious your habit and your goal should be.
Frequent: To reinforce the habit we need to be initiating it frequently and reinforcing it frequently.
For example, ‘I will go to the gym once a month’. Whilst this behaviour may promote your goal to start lifting weights it isn’t frequent enough to reinforce it into a habit and for it to become subconscious.
Here the question you need to ask yourself is- Can it be done daily or if not daily almost daily?
Make sure that the behaviour that you want to practice can be done daily or at least close to it.
Triggered: By definition habits are actions that are triggered by something in the environment such as something that’s physical or social. If we don’t have a trigger then we won’t have a habit.
One process that can be used here is the process that’s called ‘piggybacking’ in which we use an existing behaviour, action or trigger to be your new habit’s trigger and this is known as habit stacking.
For example, I was looking to try to start meditating and this is something that doesn’t really come naturally to me but I knew that every morning I’d wake up and have a cup of tea so next to the kettle I put a post-it note that said ‘meditate’ so whilst I put the kettle on I’d go away and I’d start meditating for 1 minute and then I’d come back and by the time that I’d come back, the kettle had boiled and I could start making my cup of tea so I piggybacked onto my regular habit of drinking the cup of tea.
The question that you ask yourself here is: Can it be triggered and when will I do this?
A statement that you can use here is:
After or before your habit (your current habit) you can make another habit, for example-
‘After my morning shower (your current habit) I will make myself a healthy breakfast to eat (this could be your new and next habit to put into action).
Personalisable: We are all different and are all on different paths so we must make habits personalisable. We should be 90-100% certain that we can achieve our habit on a daily basis.
E.g, if you make a habit/goal of ‘I will eat 5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day every day but realistically over time you have to ask yourself are you 90-100% certain that you can achieve that habit on a daily basis and also be honest with yourself and your coach and then if the answer is a no, well then could it be a ‘well I’m 80% certain’ so then we could say ‘okay well how about eating 2 portions of fruit and vegetables a day?’ ‘Can you do this?’ ‘Yes I can do that and I’m 100% certain’. This might be where you start off with the habits.
We must all remember that we all have different circumstances that are also ever-changing and this must be personalised in our habits from time to time.
This may mean that you need to make the habit smaller or larger.
Can you modify the habit/goal?
E.g ‘I am 90-100% confident that I will exercise every day in a 7 day week’. This can be changed as we can change the following:
The frequency - Instead of every day to every other day
Intensity - 100 press-ups to 50 press-ups instead
Units- 4 sets of press-ups to 2 sets of press-ups
Any variable to get the habit to 90-100% confidence level in order for you to be certain that you can stick to your habit so start off with a statement of where you think that you’re at and keep modifying it by reducing it or increasing it until you get to 90-100% certainty that you’re going to stick to it and quite often we’ll do more than the habit itself, for example: If we go back to that previous press up example we could say ‘every morning before I have my morning shower I will do 50 press-ups’, well I might set it initially at 25 press-ups but there’s a good chance that once I’ve gone down to the floor to do 25 press-ups then I might actually try and do 30, 35, 40, 50 or more press-ups whilst I’m there and it’s exactly the same with this habit thing, it starts as this surge of success so start it off low and don’t overestimate but ask yourself if you are 90-100% confident that you can do it almost on a daily basis
Controllable- The habit has to be 100% under your control. This is the most important principle of good habit design.
This is because if it’s out of your hands then obviously you can’t control it and then you can’t do it on a regular basis so it has to be under your control in order to do the habit.
We also can’t rely on other people or other events to practice it. For example:
My habit is: ‘I will get 8 hours of sleep a night’. This may not be in your control as what if you can’t fall asleep or what happens if you wake up or there’s a noise outside?
These things can impact your habits when actually these things aren’t under your control. You can control your sleep routine though.
Maybe your sleep goal is to get to bed at 9 pm every night or to stop watching things on screens such as your mobile etc an hour before bed. This is a habit that is under your control but the amount of sleep that you get isn’t under your control.
Here the question that you have to ask yourself is: Is it completely under my control?