Habits are like a tiny dictator with an intriguing mustache in your brain calling the shots, and you aren’t sure if you can always trust him.
Odds are very good you do a lot of activities the same every day. If you’re normal, some of those activities are good, but some are bad.
Habits are responsible for most of your behavior. Your bad habits come to mind more often since they’re usually less attractive, but there are good things too.
It starts with understanding that we are lazy.
We form habits to make things easier and automatic – to get through life’s moments without using too much energy. In primitive cultures, this probably helped us reserve energy to defend against bears and lions. Today, we save our energy to
Charles Duhigg demonstrates in The Power of Habit that habits drive individuals, but they also exist in businesses, societies, and nations too. They’re everywhere, and they can be controlled.
Here are a few things everyone should know about the dictator’s in their head.
Habits have three pillars
Every book on habits talks about this, and it’s worth repeating. What we call a habit is actually a series of three steps:
- Cue
- Routine
- Reward
The “routine” in the middle is merely a vehicle for getting the reward after we’re cued up. Someone who makes coffee first thing in the morning is cued by their awakening to seek the reward of energy. The routine is making and drinking coffee.
Retail stores and movie theaters take advantage of this too. They’ve built cues with promising rewards throughout to nudge purchases and popcorn. Everything from how the aisles are arranged to the smell of popcorn butter to the music or advertisements that run – they’re engineered to lead us into desire.
The desire is also known as a craving: how to satisfy the desire for the reward. We commonly associate the routine with the habit, but hardly ever think about what’s triggering it and what basic emotions we’re satisfying with it.
The habit is all three parts.
Habits enhance our willpower
It’s not profound to point out that your energy predictably wanes throughout the day.
Randy Gardner stayed awake for 11 days and 25 minutes before falling asleep. He was asked to perform basic math near the end of the experiment and ended up stopping halfway through because he forgot what he was doing.
All roads lead to sleep.
We start most days with our highest potential energy, but also our highest potential willpower.
Willpower is a limited resource. Like a muscle – it can be strengthened, but has limits. We navigate moments throughout our day that tap our limited willpower, exhausting it until another evening of rest.
When our reserves are low, we’re less likely to resist temptations of the body or mind. Snapping at someone after a long day, or eating an extra dessert you shouldn’t happen because our self-control muscle is fatigued.
Enter: habits.
Habits add more willpower to our tanks which improves other areas of our lives that rely on discipline. This works in two ways:
- Actions we take as a result of habits are automatic and use less energy. They preserve our resource because our brain is already programmed to handle the cue and reward.
- Higher willpower and discipline affects every corner of our lives in positive ways, researchers have found.
Anyone who build strong exercise habits have probably found they have better self-control over their diet and their emotions, for example. Positive change starts with building strong, central habits.
Great habits require a game plan
Some habits form by accident. We fall into routines without really thinking about it, then we wake up ten years later and wonder how we gained 30 pounds or cycled through a lot of jobs.
Life is how you spend your days, and our days are spent with habits. If you want a satisfying life, you need to build satisfying habits.
Start with a plan.
Starbucks required employees to figure out how they’ll handle a variety of workplace situations. Everything from obnoxious customers to broken equipment – they had to spend time thinking about their response outside of the actual event.
When we think about how to handle situations that we aren’t actively involved in, we remove the emotional temptations that arrive with it too. It gives us space to engage logical parts of our brain and build a specific plan for the future circumstance.
Over time, the actions the workforce planned on taking for a situation became automatic, leading to healthy, happy habits and giving rise to a very positive company reputation for customer service.
We can do the same in our own lives.
Rather than react in real time, it’s possible to think through a plan for how to handle something before it happens. Maybe it’s the trip to the grocery store, and planning to skip the snack aisle. It could be a financial habit too.
Building a plan for a situation dramatically increases the chance you’ll handle it better. Stacking wins this way transforms these plans into habits, and before you know it you’ll transform your life in new and interesting ways.