Habit – the repetitive behavior we follow in our life. When we do something for one day – this is a behavior. When we continuously do something on a regular basis – this becomes a habit. Another difference between these two is, we perform behavior in a conscious mind. But we perform habits in an unconscious or subconscious mind! Habit is automatic, putting less pressure on our brain because the brain doesn’t need to think about the activity when it is already a habit. A person makes around 36000 decisions on average in a day (considering the smaller decisions as well). So, the more habits you will have, the less decision the brain needs to take on your regular activity and the more it can allocate time and energy to the other important decisions.
In this year, till now I have read 3 books related to habit. These are, “7 habits of highly effective people” by Stephen R Covey, “Power of habit” by Charles Duhigg and “Atomic habits” by James Clear. Charles and James discussed a lot on habit formation. I found this topic interesting to write about! So, let’s start the topic!
Basically there are 4 stages of a habit. These are Cue, Craving, Response and Reward. In some cases Craving and Response merge together and are written as Routine. In this article I am not going to merge them. First let’s see what the four parts are?
Cue is the first stage of a habit. It is the indication of a reward. It triggers a behavior.
After Cue, the next stage is Craving. Craving is the motivation or desire to do an activity. When I crave running, my motivation is for the pleasure and fulfillment I will feel after completing my session. Craving can differ person to person. Practically, the same cue can create different cravings to different people. As a result, the same cue can create different actions to different people. When I see a glass of coca cola, I think this is very unhealthy as it is full of sugar. So, I avoid that. But when my friend sees the same glass, he becomes happy and takes that immediately!
The third stage is Response. This is the main part of a habit. This is the action. In this part we do the activity.
The last stage is Reward. This is the part for which you started the whole cycle. Rewards can be in many forms as well. It can be a mental or physical reward.
Here, without the first 3, a behavior won’t perform. Without the fourth one, a behavior won’t be repeated!
Now let’s see how you can build some good habits using these four stages of the habit loop.
To start a practice, you have to have enough cues. Cues can be in many forms. But the most effective one is time and location. You can fix that every morning I will do meditation on my bed at 7 AM. It should be more specific as well. You can write somewhere that every morning I will do meditation on my bed at 7 AM for 5 minutes. This can work as a strong cue. For cue, we should make it unavoidable. Say you want to start running, you can put your running shoes in front of you, maybe in a corner of your bedroom. So, in the morning you will see this cue of your running habit. We have around 11 million sensory receptors in the human body. Around 10 million of them are being used for sight (vision). So, what you see is the most important cue for any habit. What you want to see depends on your environment. Be the architect of your environment. This can help you to remove one bad habit from your habit basket as well. Say, you are wasting too much time using your smartphone. When you are at home, put your smartphone in another room. It will help you to remove this habit! In fact our environment has such a powerful impact on our habits. 90% of the addicted become addicted again after they come from rehab. Because they face the same cues, same triggers in the same environment!
After the cue, we have to make an opportunity attractive. Habit is a dopamine driven feedback loop. We all know this hormone, that gives us happy feelings. Dopamine doesn’t only release when we really experience something pleasurable, it’s also released when we are anticipating some rewards! One of the ways to make something attractive is to add this with something which is very satisfying for you. If you love to watch movies, you can add it with your 30 min physical exercise. You can think that after walking or running or doing 30 min of free hand exercise, you will watch a movie.
After that, the most important part. The action. To build a habit, the action should be easy, small and with less friction. If you want to build a habit of meditation, start with a 1 min meditation. Make it a routine. Digest it, then increase. If you want to build a habit of reading books, target to read 2 pages at the beginning. Once you are good at reading these 2 pages, then habit will pull you up for more pages. Also, at the beginning of a habit formation attempt, don’t focus on the accuracy or duration. Focus on the repetitiveness. It doesn’t matter at the beginning how long you are at the gym. But weekly how many days you went to the gym matters to build the habit. More than duration, it’s the repetition. Also, you can’t improve a habit which doesn’t exist. So, you have to build the habit first to be at the mastery level. In my personal life, I have used this in many cases to build some good habits. 4 years back, suddenly one day I realized that I lost my habit of regular reading. I was busy with my job, gossiping with friends, making tours and giving time to my smartphone. I decided to bring back the habit. I decided to read 30 min everyday (as a starting I suggest less than 10 min now). I could continue this and now I read 1 hour in a day on average. In my personal life, I also found how people give up doing physical exercise so early! The first day they come to the park, they start running. What a bad start this is! They had never walked 30 min before, now they decided to do physical exercise and on the first day they are running! How will their body respond? They will feel body pain from this sudden pressure on the body and the next day physical exercise is not anymore satisfying for them. They stop going to the park. They end up without making this habit. So, to build a good habit – start with small steps with short duration.
The last part is the reward for what we start the habit. In some cases, it takes time to get the reward. But from human’s primitive age, we are used to getting quick rewards. In early human history, people used to hunt an animal and would get the reward (the meat) immediately. Though after revolution we are a bit more patient than our predecessors but still we have the same tendency in our DNA. So, if we don’t get some rewards immediately, we lose our motivation. To keep our motivation we should arrange some immediate rewards. But some things just take time. What to do for them. We can arrange the rewards in different forms. Say, you decided to avoid eating out. Now, immediately you won’t get the result in your health for this. But you can put a jar in your bedroom and everytime you avoid to go eating out, you can put 500/1000 bdt in the jar. You will see in front of you that you are having some savings! So, in the short term you have got savings, in the long term you will get good health. Just make sure, your short term or immediate reward is not opposite of your ultimate goal. Say, you started physical exercise. Now as a short term reward you decided to take a chocolate bar after every workout session. It is completely opposite of your ultimate goal because this reward is bad for your health.
The quality of our life often depends on the quality of our habits. Build good habits, get a good life. Even if you can’t build some new good habits, at least remove the old bad habits.