“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.” – Aristotle
Would it surprise you to hear that some researchers believe we make upwards of 50,000 decisions a day? If we allow for 8 hours of sleep per day, that is more than a decision per second every single day (including weekends) …exhausting!
To deal with this overwhelming amount of sensory information, our miraculous and fine-tuned brain and nervous system have perfected the ability to simplify and streamline giant amounts of data into something we can manage in our daily lives. Thus, habit formation is born.
Understanding Habit Formation: How Our Brain Creates Habits
A habit is defined as “a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up” (Oxford). Our brain can take complex and repeated tasks, chunk them down, and store them as a habit. These habits are deeply stored in a very old part of the brain that plays a key role in the development of emotions, memories, and pattern recognition.
Why should we care about where habits are stored? The line from the above definition “hard to give up” should have us curious about our habit storage and retrieval system. The way complex tasks are sorted, stored, and retrieved can be easily revealed when we look at something most of us do every day - drive a car.
Habit Formation and the Unconscious Mind
It takes 1000’s of decisions to drive a car from point A to point B. When we first learn how to drive, it takes an incredible amount of concentration to keep track of every detail that helps us to stay safe and get to our destination. But with time and practice, we get to the point that we can effortlessly drive with minimal concentration (task chunking and storage for easy retrieval); so much so we can even multi-task while doing it. Deep conversations, singing along to our favourite songs, or even daydreaming while doing this task that at one time took 100% attention. Perhaps you can remember times when you’ve arrived at your destination hardly remembering the drive. Almost like waking up from a dream.
The habits needed to drive a vehicle are stored and instantly accessed without using a lot of conscious thought. The multitude of decisions needed to get safely to our destination have become somewhat unconscious, or on the edge of consciousness. In other words - autopilot.
The Influence of Habit Formation on Our Lives
If we now compare this car driving habit to how we live our daily lives, we can see that habits are often running the show behind the scenes. The very elegant system that allows us to deal with vast amounts of information and still function in the world also has us moving through our lives mostly unconsciously (on autopilot). With this unconscious system of habits at the wheel, it can be very difficult to move in a desired direction; unknowingly trapped by something that we can’t easily see.
“Our character is basically a composite of our habits. Because they are consistent, often unconscious patterns, they constantly, daily, express our character.” – Stephen Covey
Evaluating Habit Formation: Good, Bad, and Ugly Habits
All of us want to be the designer of our own lives consistently moving towards our hopes and dreams. We all want to feel successful, have deep meaningful connections, feel joy, and live a life of purpose. Yet when we honestly evaluate where we are in our life now, we can sometimes feel totally off target or even disconnected. It can feel like something outside of ourselves is calling the shots in our lives, which leads to disharmony and suffering. Concerning, right? The question is if we are not running the show of our own lives…who is?
The myriads of complex habits we have created over a lifetime have served us well in the past. They have been encouraged and reinforced with repeated results that we perceived as desirable, supporting the habit to be even more deeply engrained into our character, showing up more and more often. Our go-to habits have helped us to stay safe, avoid conflicts, reduce stress, encourage connection, and have more often than not, achieved positive results, dare I say in some cases they have even kept us alive.
Our built-in and miraculous habit system allows us to function in a complex and ever-changing world. But here’s the thing. In many cases, the information in this system is old and outdated and in desperate need of updating. Like an old computer running on an advanced system, we are unable to fully tap into our wisdom, creativity, experiences, and abilities as many of the old programs still run the show daily.
We often define habits as good and bad, but did you know that our super-efficient brains do not distinguish between good and bad? They are simply habits.
We get to consciously decide if they are good or bad.
For the purposes of increasing our understanding of our habits, let’s put them into three categories. The Good, The Bad, and THE UGLY.
The Good Habits
Defining a good habit seems easy. They are they are behaviors that get a clearly positive result in our lives. Examples could be:
waking up early
drinking enough water
doing daily meditation
eating healthy food
daily reading
consistent exercise
being proactive
process-focused
accountable
grateful
responsible
abundance-focused
considerate
and more
The Bad Habits
These also seem clear as we can draw a straight line to a negative result in our lives. Bad habits examples:
excessive drinking
overeating
not getting enough sleep
eating junk food
not enough exercise
time wasting
taking everything personally
being in victim
no time for reflection
reactive
scarcity-focused
blaming others
and more
The Ugly Habits
Here is where it gets tricky, as the ugly habit does not have a straight line to a negative outcome and can in fact be a bad habit dressed up as a good one. Deceptive right? An example of an ugly habit might be taking everything personally. This could be perceived as a good habit as we compensate by taking pride in our work, fueling us towards our passion to “get it right” and achieve great results. The wolf in sheep’s clothing is that “getting it right” might be perpetuated by overachieving and people-pleasing. For every perceived positive result achieved with this habit, a landslide of negative outcomes is behind it; from damaged relationships, decreased mental, physical, spiritual health, and self-abandonment to even derailing the very career that taking things personally was supposed to fuel. Sound familiar?
Another ugly habit we see often is the habit of staying BUSY. Many take pride in their busy lives, never saying no and burning the candle at both ends. This ugly habit may make you look like a hero to some, but in the end could have you spiralling into judgement and resentment as the busyness created by never saying no can take you in the opposite direction of your hopes and dreams.
I am sure you can think of a couple of ugly habits dramatically influencing your life right now. They are the preverbal wolf in sheep’s clothing, often running the show, but in ways that no longer serve the greater good of your life. They are tricky and we need to be vigilant to catching them in action, but at the same time be gentle with them. We have been forming these habits over our entire life. We need to thank them…and then kindly work to change or even replace them.
Habits have a powerful ripple effect through every single aspect of your life. This is why it is important to have a strategy that will help us to significantly influence habits and even replace the ones that may be hindering you with good habits of your own conscious design.
Because we know that our brains often have our bad habits on autopilot, and our ugly habits dressed up in pretty little packages, a conscious effort is needed to not just change a habit, but more effectively, replace it.
The Science of Habit Formation: Cue, Routine, Reward
Forming a habit is a three-part process:
Cue - Routine - Reward
Examples:
Hungry – reach for salty/savory food – Satiated.
Stressed – have a drink – Relieved.
Bored – surf social media – Engaged.
If we repeat the same loop enough times the brain senses a pattern and as a favor to our decision-making mind stores it deep in our brains for easy access, and voila a habit is born. The jury is out on how many repeated loops or days it takes to form a habit. 21 days of consistent routine is a popular number, but scientists today agree that the complexity of the habit has a huge impact on the length of time it takes to form. If you combine some of these loops with chemical stimulus, like caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, or internal chemicals like dopamine it takes very few loops before a habit is wired into our nervous system. For the cue-routine-reward loop to take hold in our nervous system it could take as few as one loop, and up to 1000’s.
“We first make our habits, and then our habits make us.” – John Dryden
Many people try to change habits with willpower alone, but willpower (conscious mind) fades over time, and the deeply ingrained habit eventually takes over. Only new and improved habits can replace the old ones that no longer serve us now. We are literally rewiring the brain from an old way to a new way of being.
The 3 rules of forming a new functional (moving towards hopes and dreams) habits.
Make it easy
Takes less than 5 minutes…the shorter the better.
Do it first thing in the day. (make it a priority)
Keep it simple and easy to start and use the Cue-Routine-Reward process to your advantage.
In my earlier examples…think of an alternative.
Hungry – healthy snack – Satiated.
Stressed – 5-minute meditation – Relieved.
Bored – read a book – Engaged.
Building new resourceful habits is a step-by-step approach that continually feeds the positive feedback loop with new information gathered from the newly created experiences.
“You’ll never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.” – John C. Maxwell
Dave Fyfe
Business Success Coach & Strategist
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