Building Habits
Habits build up your entire life and it is important to have habits that will benefit you in the long term, from exercise to building a new skill, but it good habits are difficult to build and bad habits always seem to stick around?
This article will talk about methods on building good habits and reducing bad habits. A lot of the ideas discussed in this article are inspired from the book Atomic Habits by James Clear, which is a great book on the subject! If you want more information regarding habits, it is a great resource on this subject.
A Brief Summary
Building good habits can always be challenging, but there are a variety of ways to make building new habits more reliable. In Atomic Habits, Clear discusses four main principles to consider when trying to build a new habit:
These four principles are:
- Cue - what triggers you to think of a given habit.
- Craving - if you want to perform the habit or not.
- Response - how will you act on your craving?
- Reward - the reward for completing your habit.
Understanding each of these laws in turn will enable you to improve habits and create new ones.
Building New Habits and Breaking “Bad” Habits
Building Good Habits
Using these four laws, we can very simply devise a strategy for both building new habits and breaking old habits that you do not want to perform any longer.
For building new habits:
| The Law | Creating a Good Habit |
|---|---|
| Cue | Make it obvious. |
| Craving | Make it attractive. |
| Response | Make it easy. |
| Reward | Make it satisfying |
For example, if you were wanting to learn to play piano, to make it very obvious you may simply just place your keyboard or piano in your bedroom or study, just seeing your piano will give you a cue to play it.
Making a new habit attractive may be challenging, but there are some ways to make it attractive, in particular you could use the fourth law in tandem to create a good reward, e.g. some chocolate if you play today which may inspire you to play. You have to be disciplined though, you cannot sneak in the chocolate if you don’t play, a great deal of habit building is discipline, but that in itself can only go so far.
Making it easy can also involve putting your piano in a very accessible place. If you’re at your desk and your piano is right next to you, it’s very easy to get on practicing, it’s right next to you after all!
Make it satisfying can be a tricky one to mould, but humans get great satisfaction from progress, if you’re working on a piece in piano for a month and finally are able to play it, you’ll be satisified with your progress.
Breaking Bad Habits
On the flip-side, this table can be inversed in a way for breaking bad habits.
| The Law | Eliminating a bad habit |
|---|---|
| Cue | Make it invisible |
| Craving | Make it unattractive. |
| Response | Make it difficult. |
| Reward | Make it unsatisfying |
In the cue, if the environment you’re in allows you easy access to something, you’re very likely to keep indulding in the bad habit. For example, if you think you have a problem with video games, the very obvious thing to reduce your game time is to simply remove your gaming system from your home by selling it. If you play on your PC and need your PC for work, you most likely won’t need a big graphics card, selling your current graphics card and replacing it with a less capable one will reduce your gaming as a lower-end card will simply not be able to run the games.
Making a habit unattractive may prove to be more challenging, you may need to reframe your mindset to highlight the negative impacts of your habit to prove it is unattractive to what you want to be as a person. Reframing this in a positive way may also help, for example, rather than focusing on the negatives, focus on the positives that will come your way is you get out of the habit. In gaming you’ll get more of your most valuable resource if you stop playing - time.
Making it difficult can work in tandem with law one for bad habits. With the gaming example, if you don’t want to sell your console but instead want to monitor your play time, making it difficult may be a better approach. To make gaming difficult you could move your games console to a hard to access place, such as in a cupboard with a lock then there is more friction if you want to play a video game. You will have to think to yourself, is this really worth the effort? Do I really want to play video games right now? If you did, you can simply get the console but there is definitely more friction using this approach.
Making it unsatisfying is straight forward for bad habits if you’re disciplined and want to be held accountable. One way to make something incredibly unsatisfying is if you make some kind of punishment for yourself if you partake in the bad habit, but of course you have to ensure you follow through with the punishment! One way to do this is getting an accountability partner and if you perform the bad habit, you’ll have to do some kind of punishment. In the TV Series “Nathan For You” he also touched on this kind of approach, stating this type of approach is what makes him incredibly productive, what he states he does is take some kind of embarassing picture of himself and gives it to a friend with the address of someone he would absolutely not want to see the picture. If he didn’t provide proof of him completing the task to his friend, he would send it off. It seems crazy but having some kind of accountability would really help in the task of building habits.
Conclusion
Overall, both the creating and destruction of habits can be boiled down to four laws. When considering a habit you want to build, the following questions are a very good starting point:
- How can I make it obvious?
- How can I make it attractive?
- How can I make it easy?
- How can I make it satisfying?
When trying to break old habits, the reverse questions can be used:
- How can I make it invisible?
- How can I make it unattractive?
- How can I make it difficult?
- How can I make it unsatisfying?
With the simple process of asking yourself these types of questions, your habits may transform!