Habit Formation/Deformation
If you stop and think about it, your life is the summation of the habits that you do.
The first thing you do when you wake up. What you do before you head to school or work. The foods you eat. The people you communicate with. Your evening activities. Every once in a while, something will happen outside of your routines, but for the most part, you live your life by habits.
But what if you want to break out of the habits that you are in? What if some of the habits you do are detrimental to you and you need to add healthier ones in instead?
We often make the mistake and try to break a habit cold turkey, thinking if we just immediately stop it, we can power through and something better will take its place. Unfortunately, our brains aren’t wired that way.
Imagine a path in the woods. At one point it was all grown over with weeds and grass. But, as more people walked the same path, a furrow was made. Soon, there was a clear path, and it was really hard to leave it as it was a lot easier to just stay on the path that was made versus forging a new one. The same goes for our habits. We’ll stick to the path of least resistance.
But, there is hope if you are wanting to change your life for the better, break poor habits, and add in better ones! It’s looking at the breakdown of habit formation and how you can apply it to your own daily life. James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, gives a short synopsis of habit deformation/formation (Clear).
For example, let’s look at breaking the habit of social media:
Cue: you get a notification
Craving: you want to see what it says
Response : you reach for your phone
Reward: you get the answer you were looking for
To change this habit of always reaching for your phone, you need to make the habit feel hard, difficult, or not rewarding. For this instance, you can remove all notifications so you won’t be interrupted. You can have your phone lock out certain apps for a certain length of time so you can’t access them. Over time, your brain will adjust to not needing that constant notification, dopamine hit. To add in a reward, create an incentive for yourself. Once you set up the parameters, give yourself a goal and a reward such as, “if I do not check my social media apps from 10-2 for 5 days, then I’ll treat myself to…”
You can apply this thought process to different habits that you want to change, whether it has to do with the money you spend, foods you eat, drinks you consume, or the company you keep. If you look for ways to build in rewards for better behavior and make it more difficult to complete the poor habit, you will find you’ve built better habits into your everyday life.
Reference: Clear, J. How to start new habits that actually stick. James Clear. Retrieved from https://jamesclear.com/three-steps-habit-change.
Challenges/Points:
Poor habits can be hard to break, but it can be done.
There are 4 parts to a habit: cue, craving, response, reward.
When you make the old habit difficult and the new habit rewarding, you can begin the process to break old habits.
Questions:
What habit do you think you can apply this process to?
What have you found to be a process that has helped you break poor habits?
Have you ever gone “cold turkey” on a habit and it actually worked?
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