The Anatomy of Habits (and How to Change Them)

The actions and thoughts you repeatedly engage in each day ultimately come to form who you are, how you act, what you believe, and what you come to accomplish in life. They are your habits.

Habits are behaviors that have been repeated so often, they no longer require conscious thought to perform.
And whether you realize it or not, your day to day life is essentially controlled by them.

Your health, your happiness, your fulfillment (success), they are all products of your habits.

So, what do you do when you want to alter your behaviors and change your habits? How do you go about enacting such a change?

In order to change your habits, it is first important to understand how habits are formed.

How habits are formed

Brains are the ultimate computer, always striving for the greatest efficiency. Because of this, brains quickly transform tasks and behaviors into habits so we can do them without putting much thought into them. This frees up brainpower and allows our brains to focus on other tasks and challenges that may require greater mental dexterity. For most part, this psychological process of encoding information is for our extreme benefit, it allows us to conserve a great deal of mental effort. But sometimes this process can make it near impossible to modify or create new habits. This is because all habits are formed through a three-step behavioral process: cue, routine, reward.

Three-step "Habit Loop" process

Cue: a trigger that initiates a behavior
Routine: the physical, mental, or emotional action; the behavior.
Reward: the benefit you gain from enacting such a behavior.

The more often this loop is repeated, the more the behavior becomes automatic. Over time, the triggering cue comes to turn the brain on autopilot, and the cue and reward steps come to be intertwined, causing a powerful sense of anticipation and craving to emerge (Duhigg, 2014).

What a habit looks like, when broken down

Cue (Trigger): Your phone notifies you of an incoming message (text, email, instagram, snapchat) through sound, vibration, or notification alert, acting as a cue for you to look at your phone.

Routine (Behavior): You look at your phone to see the incoming message.

Reward: You find out what the incoming message was. This is your reward. The reward is the benefit gained from engaging in the behavior.

If the reward is positive, you will want to repeat this routine the next time the cue happens. If you repeat this routine enough, it will becomes habitual.

(Hence the sometimes addictive behavior people have with social media, and their cell phones.)

How to change a habit

If you want to change a habit, the first thing you have to understand is that the three step process mentioned above is like the natural law of habit formation.
If you want to change a habit, those are the rules.
By using the cue, routine, reward process, you can create new habits.

To change a habit, you have to find out how to replace your current routine with a better, healthier one, all while still receiving the same reward.

Lets say you like drinking a beer or smoking weed after a long day because it relaxes you. Your reward for drinking or smoking is the relaxing effects the beer or marijuana provide for you. If you wished to change your drinking or smoking habit, you couldn't just remove them from your life without replacing them with another routine. If you were to do that, chances are you would find yourself incredibly unhappy.

Instead, what you would want to do is find a healthier, alternate routine that still gives you the reward of relaxation after a long day of work. A healthier alternative routine could be something like exercise — running, weights, hiking, yoga, mountain climbing, soccer, you get the gist. By replacing the routine of smoking or drinking with an activity such as yoga, you are able to apply a new, healthier routine that still offers the same reward of relaxation after a long day of work.

The next step would be to cut out as many triggers of the old routine as possible. If you didn't want to smoke or drink anymore, than buying beer or marijuana would be counter to your new habit formation. Your environment is what controls your habits. It can make your bad habits easier or harder to break. Don't underestimate the power of your habits. Change your environment.

It is important that you visualize yourself succeeding. If you were replacing your old routine of going home to drink a beer with your new routine of exercise, visualize yourself exercising. Visualize yourself absolutely crushing the formation of your new habit. Allow your identity to shift and change along with your new habit.

And REMEMBER, be kind to yourself when you are changing and forming new habits. It is not easy, and often it can be a two steps forward and one step back process (or even a 3 steps backwards and 1 year later process). Regardless, meet yourself with compassion, and remind yourself that you're doing it.

Some last tips

When modifying or forming a new habit, it is important that you provide yourself with reminders for the new habit. Because our brains encode information in chunks, if you tie a new habit to an old habit, when the old habit is triggered, the new habit will be triggered too. (example: if you wanted to build a new habit of flossing your teeth, and brushing your teeth was already a habit, you could floss your teeth after brushing them, thus connecting the new habit of flossing to the old habit of brushing).

Changing or creating new habits isn't easy. Remember to start small and work your way up. Small steps are better than no steps, and big steps are all small steps at some point.

Thanks for reading! If you wish to know more, I suggest you check out the book, The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg.

Duhigg, C. (2014). The power of habit: why we do what we do in life and business. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks.