Why is Life so Hard? An Action Plan to Make Life Easier

The CRAVE Cycle: The Action Stage

Once you have been cued, your craving has hit the threshold of willpower, you’re now moving into the action phase. Whether automatic or consciously decided, you are now going to do your habit. You’re driving to the gym, you’re ordering fast food, or you’re unlocking your phone to check out the latest and greatest on social media. Whatever it is, your craving has passed your willpower and you are taking action.

The CRAVE Cycle is a powerful habit model that has been adapted from common habit frameworks to include the influence of super stimulating behaviors.

This is the third blog post in the CRAVE cycle series by Mito Coaching.

The Difference between Thinking and Doing

When we look at the action phase we can break it down into two categories of behavior:

Conscious Action: Conscious action occurs when a behavior is not fully entrenched in our mind as a habit. It takes some conscious effort for you to do. You will typically feel this when you’re learning something new. Your brain is making new connections to the cues, cravings, and how to act on those. 

Our brains are relationship building machines. The first time you do an activity, you are unfamiliar with what is going on. Your brain has to work incredibly hard to understand, contextualize, and create meaning in your environment. As you get more familiar with what you are doing, the brain will discard the “meaningless” information around you and focus on what it sees as important. This is a way of protecting your body’s valuable resources. 

If every time you did something your brain treated it as a new situation, you would be absolutely exhausted. (If there a study that calculates the different levels of brain activity based on familiarity?) 

Conscious action repeated over and over turns into automatic action.

Automatic Action: Otherwise known as habit. A behavior becomes automatic when the brain has been able to fully understand something. Your brain is able to discard the extra information and send signals into the body that keep it directly focused on what is important. You have so many automatic behaviors that you may not be aware of: brushing your teeth before bed, opening your phone every time you hear a ding or buzz, drinking alcohol every time you go out with friends. Automatic behaviors eventually make most of your decisions throughout the day. 

Your brain is truly amazing. It’s ability to pick out the important pieces of information, discard what is unimportant, and action within that understanding, is remarkable. There are so many decisions to be made throughout the day that without having automatic systems in place you would be overloaded and unable to function. 

This is the primary function of the dopamine reward system in the brain. Dopamine is first nudged by your habitual cue, it then drops which creates a craving, then moves us toward action. Once that action is completed our dopamine spikes upward, receiving the reward and then dips back down. That final dip creates the urge to do the habit again. Have another donut or play another round of video games. 

Our brains can become so efficient at a behavior that eventually you do it without thinking. You have a couple glasses of wine after work, you smoke a cigarette when you’re feeling stressed, or you read a book before bed. When you try not to do these things, you feel out of whack. Your habit is engrained and like a ballerina learning her first spin, you will have to slip, fall, and stumble your way to creating or breaking this automatic habit.

“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going”

-Jim Ryun

Habits Require Consistency

Your long term goals take time and consistency. It is important to make them as simple as possible. A behavior takes anywhere from 18-256 days to become a habit. The large difference in time depends on the complexity of the behavior. Something like going to the gym can be very complex if everyday you make multiple choices to get to the gym. You have to fill a water bottle, put your shoes on, drive 10 minutes to the gym, and do this all while you’re a little tired. 

Making a habit simple means making it more likely to happen, a few good ways to do this are:

Setting up your environment: Ask yourself, when I walk into this room, what is the easiest thing to do? It’s very common for us to set up our living room with all couches facing the TV, remote on the coffee table. This makes it very simple to turn on the tv and watch it. Your environment is set up in such a way that watching tv is by far the most obvious behavior. 

Now, if you were to set up an environment that made your living room obvious for reading you could turn the couches away from the TV, put a book on the coffee table, hide the remote. You can go to the extremes and unplug your TV, even move it into a closet after each use. If your tv is in the closet and your book is on the coffee table, you will be much more likely to read the book than watch TV. 

Connect your good habit with a habit that already exists: Your day is already filled with habits that you consistently do. You can lean on these habits to offer you a way to support a healthy habit.

This can be done with just about anything: want to eat healthier? Everytime you order food, you must eat a vegetable before you eat your take out. Want to study for your exam? Study for 15 minutes between each game of Fortnite. By linking behaviors we have to do with things we want to do it makes the good behavior more appealing and the bad one a little less. This will balance out the super stimulus of things like social media and video games while elevating healthy eating and studying. 

Find a group: Community is the most powerful way to form and sustain new habits. Doing things alone can be difficult. On days when you don’t want to continue with your habit, a group will make you want to show up. Not only because you have more fun and can get really invested. Groups create accountability. When you miss a day of group fitness with your friends, you then have to explain why. When that reason is not good enough, you have to suffer through the jeers of your group. Your group will hold you accountable to the common goal.

Why do I keep doing this?

When a habit has taken hold it is very difficult to stop. Here we mention some strategies to stop your bad habits:

Say your habit out loud and why it is bad: This one has a bit of a psychological backing. If you want to change an automatic behavior, you need to bring the activity into the conscious thought patterns. Anytime you notice your behavior begin to occur, say the behavior out loud, followed by why you think it is a bad behavior. For example:

“I am about to drink alcohol, I do not want to drink alcohol because I cannot stop at one drink and my next 2 days are ruined.”

“I am about to online shop and I do not want to online shop because it is draining my bank account and ruining my ability to enjoy my life”

It can be a simple process of saying what you are about to do, whether you want to do it, and why. While the process is simple, the influence it has is large. When you put an automatic behavior out in the open and can watch as it happens, it makes it noticeable and allows your conscious brain to make the decision. Sometimes this is enough to break the habit by itself. For more ingrained habits, the awareness can begin a cascade of other strategies that cannot be used unless you have awareness. 

Make the hurdles significant: Making a habit you want to change difficult to do, gives you more time to stop the behavior. Our brains were made to make fast decisions on reward versus effort to keep us alive. As you start to increase the effort required to get a reward, it makes your brain take longer to make the decision. If your junk food is in the basement, you now have to decide if it’s worth the energy of going down the stairs, coming back up and doing it again when you're done. That added friction can stunt most small cravings, which can be a significant change. It can also kickstart a habit change. 

Try to interrupt the behavior: This one is particularly hard and can be quite rewarding. Some behaviors take a long time to complete, and if you can catch a behavior before it spirals out of control you can lower its impact. Take a 5-10 minute break before you eat that second donut. Do a house chore between each episode of your binge watch of the latest season of drama, drama, drama. Over time these interruptions will become natural and allow you to decrease the stimulus your brain and body have to go through. 

Be mindful of what caused the action: This is a shout out to the cue and ramp stages of the crave cycle. When you are actioning on a behavior, take some time to understand what made you think of the behavior. You should also pay attention to the ramping up of craving. Taking notice of these stages will help you curb a behavior before you’re in the action phase. 

Changing behavior can be very difficult and there is no one size fits all for how to change a behavior. Something that works for a friend may not work for you. For the first few weeks you will want to treat this more as an experiment than a prescription. Find out what works for you. 

Be Kind to Yourself

This goes for forming new habits and breaking old habits. You are human, your habit is likely a product of many years of continuous, automatic behavior. You will slip up. Miss a day at the gym, scroll social media for longer than you wanted, watch porn, or eat dessert when you’re at a family gathering. It is okay. 

Habits are about making the conscious effort to change and winning over the course of months, years, and decades. A slip up here and there will happen. Do your best to let it slide and look for the next opportunity to get yourself back in the win column. Some small ways to help:

Understand why you lost: Look for the cues, ramp up, action, and reward. Understand what causes your slip up, make a plan for next time, and get on with your life. 

Practice Mindfulness: Pay attention to your feelings. When the craving hits, pay attention to what changes occur in your mind and body. 

Habit formation and changing is a journey. It is okay to take two steps forward and one step back. Honestly, it’s expected. Do your best to keep that motion in the positive direction and you will eventually form a winning habit.