How habits work (and how to change them)

Sometimes, life feels like it’s dripping with irony – and habits are a classic example of that.

You’ve undoubtedly experienced moments in your life in which, try as you might, it takes an extreme amount of effort to form a positive behaviour habit, only for it to take a fraction of the time to fall apart once it’s set.

Alternatively, you might have identified several bad habits within yourself and, regardless of whether or not you want to break them, you have no idea how they formed in the first place.

My exercise routine adheres to this phenomenon: it took more than a month of me requiring focused and channelled discipline to get up between 5-5:30am and either go for a run or do a workout session at my local park, before the effort required started to ease and it just became my routine.

However, every time I get an injury playing sport, or I get a cold, and I’m forced to ease off my routine, suddenly I find myself hitting the snooze button on my alarm and coming up with all the excuses in the world to not resume my routine.

How habits work

The “Three Rs” (Raypole, 2019) concept gives us an understanding of how behaviours take hold and transform into habits:

• reminder (a trigger or a cue to initiate a behaviour);
• routine (repeating incidents of the behaviour);
• reward (you get something from it, making it likely that you’ll do it again).

According to a 2009 article published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, titled “How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world” (Lally et al, 2009), the automaticity of actions (habituation) takes anywhere between 18 to 254 days.

Behaviours and habits that engage your dopaminergic system – your reward centre – are harder to change and are at the higher end of that range, such as drinking and drug use (National Institutes of Health, 2012).

How this plays out

Understanding this process and the mechanism of habit-forming can help us understand our own behaviours and challenges in changing them.

Consider the common example of having a glass of alcohol after a hard day at work, and how that can easily spiral out of control and transform into a case of problematic and unhealthy drinking:

• Reminder: the stress of the day and arriving to the comfort and safety of home is enough of a reminder trigger.
• Routine: you walk the same path from the door to the kitchen, open the same cupboard, get the same glass, pour the same drink – all while conducting a conversation with your partner or kids, like it’s all a part of the routine of coming home after a hard day. That’s because it is – you’ve incorporated drinking into the routine, and it strengthens the more it runs.
• Reward: alcohol itself is a relaxant, and if you’ve used it to ‘take the edge off’ a hard day, your brain will respond by releasing dopamine as a reward response, because it very much likes feeling safe, and it combines with the endorphin response of your relaxed state.

Suddenly, you’ve created a situation where your brain responds to drinking in a positive way and rewards you with a hit of the same neurochemicals responsible for giving you a sense of meaning and purpose.

It’s only very small steps from that, to becoming a functioning alcoholic who drinks every day, whether it’s a hard day or not.

This is why it’s not a simple task for drug addicts to give up their drug of choice – their brains are telling them that the drug gives their life meaning and purpose.

This also helps us understand why a behaviour such as the exercise routine I mentioned earlier is harder to form into a habit, and easily undone.

Exercise puts our bodies under stress and pressure – that’s the entire point of it – and, even though it’s good for us, our mind and body don’t like being put under stress and pressure, so they’ll resist you forming the habit in whatever ways they can, and they’ll jump ship once it’s formed at the first opportunity.

How to work with this process

Habit and behaviour identification and change is a key element to your Story of My Life Journal, and it uses the science mentioned above to support you in making positive adjustments.

Time

There’s a misconception that seems to have taken hold that says habits take 30 days to form, but as we can see from the research mentioned previously, they can take less than that, but can also take almost a whole year.

For that reason, your Story of My Life Journal encourages you to set one habit or behaviour a month to concentrate on, and whether you’re using the journal or haven’t taken the plunge yet, that’s the approach we recommend you take.

Focusing on more than one habit is not paying the due respect to the effort required to change a behaviour.

If you’re at the bottom end of the time range and change your behaviour quickly, it won’t do you any harm to reinforce your change for a full month. If you need longer, which would likely be the case, then you can roll your habit/behaviour commitment over to the next month.

Eyes wide open

It’s important to go into any habit or behaviour change with your eyes wide open.

The research and examples mentioned above outline the resistance you’ll face in either establishing new habits that place a demand you, your mind, and/or your body, and highlight the request you’re making of your mind and body to abandon existing habits that, even though potentially unhealthy, are pumping you with reward chemicals.

So, you need to consider and prepare for the challenges both scenarios will present, to help lay a path of least resistance.

When considering challenges and how you’ll overcome them, try to be as realistic and specific as possible.

This will give you the best chance of success.

You wouldn’t realistically expect an alcoholic to list a challenge as “wanting to drink”, and the solution to simply “not drink”.

Path of least resistance

So, for example, let’s say you’re having a hard time fitting exercise in, because your lack of motivation makes all the barriers – such as getting changed – seem insurmountable.

Psychologist Wendy Wood, author of “Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science Of Making Positive Changes That Stick”, addressed this issue in NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast (episode: “Creatures of Habit”), saying she slept in her running clothes while trying to form an exercise habit, so she was able to get out of bed, get straight out the door, and get home in time to make her kids breakfast.

Change is hard, and you’re wired to resist it.

That’s why it’s important to acknowledge the challenges and plan for how to overcome them, so they don’t derail your efforts.

Set yourself a reward

All of this habit forming/breaking stuff is hard work, which makes it very easy for your mind and body to abandon ship.

So, as well as making the whole process as frictionless as possible, it’s also important to WANT to continue making the effort.

One of the easiest ways to do that is by dangling a carrot on a stick.

Think about a healthy, aligned-to-goal reward that you can set yourself as a little extra encouragement if you stick to the behaviours you’re attempting to reinforce.

If it’s the exercise example, maybe your reward is that, after a month of sticking to the routine, you get to buy yourself a new pair of running shoes.

You’re going up against some of your brains most powerful mechanisms – use every trick in the book to make it a fair fight.