Healthy Habits
Healthy vs. Unhealthy Habits
Many of our day-to-day actions, both at work and in our personal lives, are defined by our habits, those familiar routines and ingrained behaviors that we execute with little or no conscious thought. Habits are generally labeled as “good” or “bad” because they generate a repeated impact on our lives that we consider to be either positive or negative. Good (or healthy) habits have a positive impact, whereas bad habits have a negative (or unhealthy) impact. The problem with unhealthy habits is that they often tend to persist despite our desire for change. Fortunately, by better understanding the mechanisms driving our habits, we’re better positioned to reengineer our routines to suit our values and preferences.
Unhealthy habits tend to share three things in common: 1) we suffer one or more negative consequences from the habit, 2) we endure these negative consequences in return for a temporary (often paltry) sense of reward or relief, and 3) over time, these habits tend to erode our quality of life. Some examples of bad habits include smoking, overeating, excessive alcohol consumption, watching too much television, and spending too much time online.
Good habits, on the other hand, tend to help us be more healthy, productive, or fulfilled in our lives. In this way, we benefit from our own momentum, carried along by our automatic tendencies and preferences as we engage in actions that enhance our quality of life. Common examples of good habits include exercising, healthy eating, getting sufficient sleep, treating others with respect, spending time with friends and loved ones, telling the truth, and accepting personal responsibility for our actions on a daily basis.
Quick Tip: Since our habits have such a strong impact on our quality of life, possessing the ability shape your habits is of great value. And while it may not be easy to modify a habit, the effort invested is more than rewarded when positive and healthy behaviors replace old and undesirable routines.
The Cue, The Routine, and The Reward
The Power of Habit, authored by Charles Duhigg, synthesizes the enormous body of research underpinning the nature of our habits. Duhigg determined that habits consist of powerful loops composed of three parts: 1) the cue, 2) the routine, and 3) the reward.
Habit Loop
Cues are essentially triggers that signal your brain to automatically execute a habit routine.
Routines are the actual behavior(s) you wish to change.
Rewards serve to reinforce the process and make it more likely to keep occurring again in the future.
Based upon the habit loop, Duhigg’s innovative process for reshaping a habit involves four key steps: 1) Identify the Routine, 2) Experiment with Rewards, 3) Isolate the Cue, and 4) Have a Plan.
Step One: Identify the Routine
Routines serve as the ideal gateway for understanding habit loops. By identifying the routine, you’re in a position to observe the habit loop, which in turn empowers you to replace an unhealthy habit with a healthy habit. For example, imagine you have an unhealthy habit of watching five hours of television before bed each night. This habit has led to you being inactive, not returning phone calls from friends, ignoring household chores, staying up too late, and having difficulty falling asleep. Although you’ve tried to avoid watching too much television each evening, you find yourself parked in front of the TV again night after night, watching reruns of old sit-coms while neglecting your responsibilities, leading to feelings of guilt and eroding your sense of self-efficacy.
Key Point: Fortunately, routines are often easy to identify because they consist of your actions; specifically, those very behaviors that you wish to change. In this example of watching too much television, the routine consists simply of turning on the television each evening and watching it until you fall asleep.
Once you’ve identified the routine, it’s important to dig deeper and isolate the cue for the routine. Ask yourself: What is the trigger that leads to the execution of this routine? Is it that you feel bored (and the television provides some light entertainment)? Is it that you’re physically tired but not yet ready to fall asleep (and the TV provides an excuse to relax)? Perhaps you’re mentally exhausted (and the TV is a means for mentally checking out)? Or maybe you’re seeking to escape the burden of more demanding tasks (and watching TV is the easiest option available)?
The other important question to address is: What is the reward? Here, it’s important to ask yourself: What is reinforcing this routine for me, so that it keeps persisting? Is it the entertainment associated with watching certain TV shows? Is it the physical relaxation of lying on the couch? Is it the mental escape at the end of a demanding workday? Or is it the avoidance of potentially more demanding activities such as yard work, home repairs, cleaning, organizing, or paying bills?
Step Two: Experiment with Rewards
The purpose of experimenting with rewards is that it helps us to identify what we are craving, and once we identify the craving we can understand the desire underpinning the habit loop.
There are a number of different ways to experiment with rewards. One of the best ways to start, according to Duhigg, is to wait until you feel the urge to engage in the routine, and then respond to that urge by doing something different than the normal routine. If you’re working to change the habit of watching too much television, for example, you’ll wait until you feel the urge to turn on the TV and then, instead of turning on the TV you’ll do something different. The key is to choose alternatives that are not unhealthy or harmful, but otherwise to experiment with a variety of options. You might try chatting with a friend (try friends you know from work and also friends from outside of work), calling someone on the phone to catch up, meeting a friend for dinner, going to the gym, going for a walk, reading a book, planning a vacation, meditating, cleaning up your garage, taking on a new project, and so on. You can come up with a lot of great options, and this will help you gather important information.
As you vary your routine, you’re giving yourself the opportunity to test different ideas regarding what drives the habit loop. Each time you do something other than your normal habit routine, you’re running an experiment. You’re gathering information, much like a detective or a scientist, that will help you to discover the truth, and once you know what’s actually driving your habit loop, you’ll be empowered to make changes.
There are a couple of other tricks that can help you, according to Duhigg, as you experiment with rewards by altering your routine. Remember, the key here is to ultimately determine what you are craving, because that way you’ll know what’s driving your habit loop. Each time you try a new routine, one trick is to take a pen and paper, and write down a few of the feelings you’re experiencing or thoughts that come to mind as you complete the new activity. Next, wait for fifteen minutes (setting a timer is helpful with this step) and then ask yourself if you’re still craving the old routine (e.g., watching television). Waiting for fifteen minutes is important because it helps you determine if your new activity satisfied the craving for the old routine. For example, if meditating for thirty minutes helps stave off mental exhaustion, and fifteen minutes after meditating you no longer have the urge to watch TV, then you’ve successfully identified that mental exhaustion was leading you to crave watching TV. Writing down a few of your thoughts and feelings after each new activity is helpful in case you need to dig deeper to uncover your craving. For example, imagine that you finish meditating, you then write down your thoughts and feelings, and fifteen minutes later you’re craving television. At that point, you examine what you wrote down, and you read: “I feel bored” and “I’m relaxed.” These notes now serve as powerful data, because they reveal that while you found meditation to be relaxing, you felt bored. Therefore, when you found yourself still craving television, it wasn’t to satisfy a need for relaxation, but for stimulation.
Key Point: By taking the time to experiment with different rewards, you’ll eventually be able to determine the specific craving that drives your habit loop.
Step Three: Isolate the Cue
In The Power of Habit, Duhigg makes a strong case that isolating the cue that triggers a habit loop is more difficult when we’re exposed to too much information. By reviewing the psychological research, he determined the important questions to ask when we wish to isolate a cue from the backdrop of unimportant and distracting information. Based on the research, Duhigg discovered five key questions to ask yourself when isolating the cue that triggers a habit loop. Ask yourself these five questions when you experience the urge to engage in a habit:
Where are you?
What time is it?
What’s your emotional state?
Who else is around?
What action preceded the urge?
After a few sequences of examining your habit, the first elements of a pattern should begin to emerge. For example, does the urge strike repeatedly at a particular time of day? At a certain location? When you’re experiencing a specific emotion? When someone particular (or no one at all) is around? Or following some specific other behavior or event?
Key Point: By analyzing the patterns revealed by these five questions, you’ll be on the path to isolating the cue from the background noise.
Step Four: Have a Plan
Armed with a strong understanding of your habit loop, you’re empowered to modify the habit itself.
Key Point: What you want to do now is take your deep understanding of your habit loop, from the cue that triggers it to the routine that manifests to the reward that reinforces the loop, and use those insights to shift away from an unhealthy pattern to a new healthy routine.
Using the example of watching five hours of television before bed each night, let’s imagine that we learned quite a lot about our bad habit. Identifying the routine turned out to be easy – it consisted of turning on the TV and watching it until we fell asleep. Experimenting with rewards, we discovered that meditating for twenty minutes and then engaging in another activity (anything engaging – from spending time with friends to exercising at the gym) caused us to no longer experience the craving to watch TV. Working to isolate the cue, we determined that coming home to an empty house at the end of a long day served to activate our TV craving. Based on all of this information, we can write up a plan. In this example, the plan might look like this:
I’ll make a list of healthy and engaging activities that I’d like to do more frequently (examples might include jogging, playing an instrument, spending more time with friends, or learning a new language).
When I come home to an empty house at the end of a long day, I’ll meditate for twenty minutes then I’ll choose an activity from my new list and do that instead of watching TV.
It might be challenging at first to make the shift. Old habits can be hard to break. But your chances of dropping an unhealthy habit and replacing it with a new healthy routine are enhanced when you understand the dynamics driving your old habit, as this allows you to engineer change that will address the underlying cravings driving the old behavioral pattern. In the TV example, it turns out that two factors were driving the old routine: 1) mental exhaustion and 2) boredom. So the solution was to target mental exhaustion with twenty minutes of meditation, and then to target the boredom with a variety of healthy activities that can vary according to your needs and preferences.
Moving Forward
In the end, you have many tools at your disposal when seeking to build healthy habits.
Quick Tip: One of the best options is to replace an unhealthy habit with a new, healthy routine because in this way you’ll not only gain a net positive, but you’ll achieve this gain while eliminating a negative habit from your life.
Of course, some habit changes are more manageable than others. In some cases, it can be necessary or beneficial to utilize professional help. Lastly, if you’re interested in reading The Power of Habit, you can click here to learn more about Charles Duhigg’s bestselling book.
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