Why Habits are the Key to Programming Routines

Habits are incredibly powerful. Long before we had access to fMRI brain scanning technology, behavioral psychology interventions, or a contemporary understanding of neuroplasticity, sources attribute Aristotle with writing, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”  In the late 1800s, William James- an early and pragmatic voice in the field of psychology- stated, “All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits”.

Think about it. You finally sit down after a long day of tasks and to do lists, physically exhausted, mentally scattered, and emotionally frazzled. You remember that you needed to send one last email to your co-worker about a meeting in the morning at 8:30 but find that without thinking, you’ve opened your preferred social media app. You decide to “just check” on what everyone has been up.

You find yourself, several minutes (maybe hours) later scrolling through a Buzzfeed article so obscure you would never be able to retrace your steps back to your original task. You have the strange sense that this has happened several times today but are already so late for your next engagement that you put the thought out of your mind. Outside of your conscious awareness, the same scenario plays out every day at 6:24pm and has for the last several weeks.

Congratulations! You have created a habit.  

Charles Duhigg, who authored The Power of Habit, writes:

“Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making but they’re not. They’re habits.” He goes on to say, “…though each habit means relatively little on its own, over time, the meals we order, what we say to our kids each night, whether we save or spend, how often we exercise, and the way we organize our thoughts and work routines have enormous impacts on our health, productivity, financial security, and happiness.”

I’m sure that you can think of several of your overt habits immediately- grabbing a cup of coffee on the way to work or school, taking an afternoon break to talk to a co-worker around 3 pm, brushing your teeth before you go to sleep at night. Other habits operate out of conscious awareness and get along quite well without us ever having to choose, evaluate, or maintain them.

Sometimes these habits malfunction. For example, you take a particular route to get home each evening but tonight, you’re meeting a friend for dinner in the other direction. You know that you’re not departing for your usual destination and yet, you take the familiar turn anyway and arrive at dinner a few minutes late. Whether intentional or innate, habits help to automate our mental and physical lives to free up more time and energy for tasks that require more cognitive effort.

Whether intentional or innate, habits help to automate our mental and physical lives to free up more time and energy for tasks that require more cognitive effort.

This is good news for us because our lives are complex and becoming ever more complicated. Rapid technological advances, global connectivity, and instantly accessible information are modern luxuries that make our lives convenient and efficient. However, they can also contribute to poorer health outcomes, serving as stressors on body and mind. Other sacrifices for such convenience can often be simplicity, creativity, deep work, and meaningful relationships.

Here is basic formula for “rewriting” your habit “code”:

Diagnose the Habit

Habits, when utilized mindfully, can be powerful tools for navigating an increasingly complex and brave new world. They, like our technology, can be “programmed” to help offload tasks like getting up at a certain time in the morning or finding our way home while thinking about what to make for dinner. The key is learning to identify them and what makes them stick.

• Identify the Habit: Spend some time considering what habit you would like to change. This might require some tracking or journaling. It might just mean paying greater attention to what you do when your attention is elsewhere (i.e. mindfulness).

• Identify the Need Being Met: Ask what needs the habit is meeting for you and why it is so ingrained. What is the physical, mental, or emotional cue that communicates a need to your brain a need (for food, for socializing, for a break, for relief from a negative emotion)? What cue activates the habit?

• Identify the Behavior: What is the habit itself? What behavior is linked to this cue? Try to catch yourself in the act. Even if you don’t change the behavior right away, note that it is a behavior that has become programmed into your unconscious.

• Identify the Reward: What are you getting from performing the habit behavior? What is the reward?

Craft a New Routine

Now that you have identified and diagnosed your habit, let’s talk about replacing it. Charles Duhigg writes, “To change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.” He says, “If you use the same cue, and provide the same reward, you can shift the routine and change the habit. Almost any behavior can be transformed if the cue and reward stay the same.”

• Decide a Replacement Routine: What would you rather have happen when you recognize the “cue” to perform the habit? Instead of reaching for you phone, would you rather reach for a book? Instead of going to the fridge at 8pm at night to numb an emotion, would you rather call a friend or initiate a conversation with you partner?

• Insert a New Routine: Replace the behavior! This might be the most difficult part because it requires an opposite action which takes a world of energy when you are beginning to implement a change. The first time might be excruciating but by the fourth or fifth time, your mind will begin to learn this new behavior offers a similar reward.

Once you begin to notice your habits and work towards changing them, your life can become far more intentional and purposeful. Rather than being told by marketing campaigns, media outlets, or individuals who say “this is how we’ve always done it,” you will find that you have greater freedom to choose what habits are meaningful to you. No longer enslaved to unconscious habits, you can begin to ask yourself who you want to be and what kind of life would be meaningful for you.

So just start! What is the new behavior you want to implement? The inspiration to change starts with action (a blog on motivation coming soon!). You can build habits that gradually to reflect what you really want your life to be (another blog on cultivating practices also on the horizon) but for right now, pick one thing that you want to change. What do you want your life to look like in a few weeks, a month, or a year? Pick one thing and start doing it EVERY DAY.

A Note on Technology…

Our cell phones are habit forming devices, more than any other power in our environment. (If you’ve been paying attention, this article is built around a technological analogy.) Before the dawn of smart phones, Thomas Merton wrote:

We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.

Selecting what to attend to in an over-stimulated world is crucial to the cultivation of habits that nurture and heal our minds and bodies. While you’re identifying habits and crafting new routines, why not evaluate your smart phone usage? Just start by noticing. And when you have, go back to the beginning of the article and read it once more.

If you feel that you need help changing a habit or getting to the underlying issue maintaining it, please reach out or visit here for more details.