The Complete Guide to Habits
According to the European Journal of Social Psychology, it takes on average 66 days to form a new habit and can range from 18 to 254 days.
Habits are powerful predictors of behavior. They override intentions and are triggered by cues in your life. Habits guide actions that will lead to your long-term goals or your long-term losses. They act as a a mechanism for self regulation to help you pursue your best life.
In this guide you will learn the categories of habits, how your brain influence’s habits, and how to form and break habits.
“Sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny.”
-George D. Boardman
Categories of Habit
Habits can be broken down into three primary categories, each providing its own opportunities and challenges for changing them and holding onto them.
Motor Habits: Motor habits are habits of the muscle. These habits have been refined overtime to make you as efficient as possible in movement. Your body has spent your entire life learning how to move, from the distance of your stride to the posture of your back. This goes double if you play sports. All types of movement such as sitting, standing, running, walking, exercising, and writing are of motor habits.
Cognitive Habits: Cognitive habits are related to your psychological and thought processes. Your cognitive habits include good observation, accurate perception, logical thinking, reasoning, and others. One of the most noticeable cognitive habits is self-talk. Self-talk is the typical dialogue you have about yourself. Whether you typically say “Wow, I’m awesome and in great shape” or “Ugh, I’m fat and ugly”. Both are different versions of a similar cognitive habit.
Character Habits: Character habits are your perceptions of who you are. These can have an outsized influence on your smaller habits. These are habits like time management, trusting others, helping people, and being hardworking. You will typically have a high emotional attachment to these habits, making them very powerful and can be hard to form and almost impossible to break.
All of these habits are linked together to perform a particular habit. Your character is that of a healthy person, which influences your cognitive habit to think about healthy eating, which engages a motor habit of grabbing an apple instead of a chocolate bar. This means that to form or break a habit you must look at each category to find out how that habit will be influenced. Looking back on Mr.Boardman’s words above, your habits will define your destiny.
Dopamine’s Influence on Habits
By now, there’s a good chance you have heard of dopamine. Some call it the molecule of pleasure, Danial Lieberman more accurately calls it the molecule of more. Dopamine is the driving force behind the motivation to do anything. From the simplest things like getting out of bed, reaching for water, and walking from place to place. Without dopamine, you would stay in bed and only drink or eat what was directly fed to you. Dopamine’s evolutionary functions are vast. It is what motivates you to pursue your needs like food and water. It makes you pursue reproduction. It is the reason you pursue anything.
Dopamine is a very powerful neurochemical and is the primary driver of behavior. Dopamine does not create satisfaction or pleasure, it only creates drive and reinforcement. More of a molecule of lust and desire. You can find more on what dopamine in our post What Is Dopamine?.
When it comes to our habits, dopamine has an oversized influence on us. During different stages of the habit, dopamine fluctuates to create desire, wanting, and reinforcement. During the cue and ramp stages, Dopamine fluctuates up and down. Each time you see a cue, dopamine takes a small spike. It then drops down below baseline. This lack of dopamine ramps up our craving. Once that craving becomes strong enough, we are driven to action.
During action our dopamine slowly increases as you get closer and closer to your goal. Dopamine then spikes to a peak when you get the reward. This spike marks the behavior as being victorious. After that spike, dopamine drops significantly, making us crave more and more of it (Hence the accurate name by Danial as the molecule of more). Depending on the strength of the spike during victory, there can be a strong Echo. This Echo results in craving the behavior again.
How to Form and Break Habits
Breaking bad habits can often be a difficult but worthwhile pursuit. Breaking a bad habit can take weeks, months, or years. Oftentimes when you think you have it broken, a slip-up slingshots you back into the habit and weeks go by before you realize it. The science of habits points to the habit loop as the prime mechanism behind forming good and bad habits. Habits are formed through the Crave Cycle:
Cue: The cue is the internal or external stimulus that begins a habit. Cues are incredibly important to habit formation as it is like pushing the first domino.
Learn more about cues in our post The First Step To Breaking a Bad Habit
Ramp: Once you have observed a cue, you begin to want to do that habit. This can feel like a strong pull or it can fly completely below your radar and be automatic. The craving involved with the ramping phase often occurs along a bell curve and will peak and subside over time.
We discuss the Ramp stage in our post Why am I Craving?
Action: The action phase is when your motor habits kick in. You move toward the doughnut shop at the end of the block, grab your favorite controller to play games, or open up amazon to buy something. The shorter the distance is between the cue and the action step the more likely it is that the behavior will occur. Corporations have spent billions of dollars and millions of hours of man time to make that distance as short as possible. Oh, you’re feeling a little down? Poke a screen 2 times and you can buy something to ease your pain.
The action phase is described in detail at Why is Life so Hard? An Action Plan to Make Life Easier
Victory: Once you have completed an action you will be rewarded with the subsequent flood of neurochemicals that mark the behavior. That flood can be positive, like the endorphins after a hard workout or oxytocin after making love with your partner. It can also be negative, a quick and repeated dopamine hit from social media or an oxytocin flood binding you to your computer screen after pornography use. Whether positive or negative this step will reinforce the behavior, ingraining it into your brain.
Victory can be understood from our post Instant Gratification Vs. Delayed Gratification
Echo: Echo how the body and brain communicate that they want more of something. If the first bite of a peach is juicy and tasty, dopamine will spike and lower so that you take another bite. When dealing with high stimulus behaviors like porn, drug use, or video games your brain continues to crave more immediately after the first use. The Echo becomes more powerful the stronger the dopamine spike in victory is.
Learn to use the Echo at Making Addiction Manageable
Good Habits vs Bad Habits
There are no bad habits. Let me say that again for the people in the back, THERE ARE NO BAD HABITS. All of your habits were formed to offer you something that is important. Do you bite your nails? How about chewing your shirt? Or using hard drugs? These behaviors were likely adopted as a way to manage stressful situations, deal with disappointment, or manage traumatic experiences. Our brains have learned to relieve pain as quickly as possible and we have become very efficient at it. Once that negative emotion is felt, we will immediately move toward solving the problem.
So there are no bad habits but there are habits that no longer serve us positively. Nail biting, chewing your shirt, and hard drugs all reach a point where the immediate positive benefits result in long term negative impacts. Nail biting and shirt chewing cause poor hygiene and bad impressions, not so bad. Hard drugs can cause anxiety, depression, addiction, and death over time. So it is important that you pick the right habits that can offer enough satisfaction immediately while preserving long term gains as well.
The Power of Small Habits
Compounding is a term used to describe percent gains in the financial world adding up over time. When you make a compounding investment that means it continues to go up over time and builds upon itself until it is massive. A one percent increase everyday becomes 3,700% after 30 days. That makes an investment grow massively over time.
Compounding is exactly how habits work as well. It is better to do a little bit everyday then it is to sink a huge amount of time at once. You can think of habits as small, consistent steps down the path you want to go. The size of the steps do not matter, as long as you continue down the path you will get to where you are going.
Making you Nervous with the Nervous System
The nervous system: The nervous system has two primary systems that most of our behavior is run through. The parasympathetic nervous system and the sympathetic nervous system make up to two sides of how nervous systems react.
The parasympathetic nervous system is referred to as the state of rest and digest. When this system is more active, you are more relaxed and no urgent needs require attention. You are safe, fed, and not worried about survival. In this state you can do our most clear thinking, anxiety levels are low, and your brain waves more into a relaxed state. The parasympathetic nervous system is in charge of the state that we most like to be in.
The sympathetic nervous system is our fight or flight response. When this system is active you are on high alert. You are more likely to take action. This state is used in high pressure situations, raising cortisol levels in the brain and requiring high energy output from the brain and body. In this state, you will make decisions for the short term. Seeking the comfort of high calorie foods and pleasurable activities. All in an effort to get the system back to a relaxed place.
Media, food, and technology have all become masters of keeping you in the “Fight or flight” state, with high sympathetic nervous system activity. When anxiety is high, you are more likely to buy that pair of shoes you don’t need, eat the chocolate bar that has no nutritional value, and scroll through social media. Over time, if we stay in the “fight or flight” stage, it can cause major health problems. Things like heart attacks, depression, high blood pressure, and diabetes can be linked to having high sympathetic nervous system activity.
Big corporations are fighting to keep your attention and throwing your health and sanity by the wayside in favor of profits. They are becoming smarter and smarter each day with new strategies to stimulate your brain with highly sexual advertising, blood and gore and even down to miniscule details like the color and shape of your notifications. Everything around you is highly stimulating and promises high rewards for minimal effort. Our brains can barely handle it and this is what we now call anxiety.
But that doesn’t mean you are screwed. There are many strategies that can be deployed to protect your brain from over stimulus. These strategies will make you calmer and higher functioning so you can pick the habits that will make you successful.
Not All habits are Your Choice
These are things that are particularly alarming in your environment that attract attention. They target the brain to make it more alert and demand that you pay attention to them. Things like horror movies, your phone’s ringtone, and even the color of the notification icons. Have you noticed those little numbered circles are always bright red?
Our brains, through evolution, have learned to pay attention to certain things in our environment more readily than others. High pitched sounds (To wake to crying babies), bright colors (Poisonous animals and mushrooms), and pain (Survival). All of these things act as signals to our brain that something needs our attention right now. Fast forward to today, companies take advantage of these processes to grab your attention and keep it. They have invested billions of dollars to discover what is the best way to make you pay attention to their service.
High alert signals cause us to shift our focus, break our concentration, and shorten our ‘attention span. When these signals are not properly controlled, the negative impacts can be significant. High alert signals cause our bodies to shift into the sympathetic nervous system (fight-or-flight). If you are always in the fight or flight state, your body can never relax. This causes exhaustion and anxiety.
Habits will Define Your Destiny
There is nothing more powerful than a good habit. Nothing that holds us back quite like a bad habit. We are what we do. What we do determines who we can be.
