Hacking Habits

A guidebook to hacking your own habits so you can take on anything.

(This is a preliminary draft. If there is enough positive feedback, we'll do more.)

   "We are what we repeatedly do.    Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." -Aristotle

Learning to Drive

Your father walks around to the passenger side, unlike before, and you step into the driver’s seat. You reach to the left instead of the right to grab the seat belt. It makes the familiar click noise when you slot it. Your dad explains the pedals and the steering, mirrors and such, mostly things you know, but it’s different to actually step on the gas pedal. There’s a weird delay from when you press to when the engine roars. It roars louder than you intended. The wheel feels oddly mechanical to move, kicking back a bit when you give it a turn. Eventually, your dad tells you to hold down the brake and put the car in reverse, you do and then pivot in your seat to look through the back windshield. You let go of the brake and the car rolls faster than you’re comfortable with, you step back down on the brake, and you both jolt back into your seats.

Your dad laughs.

Your first time driving required all of your concentration. So did the second, third, and many more times, but after a month or a year, almost every aspect of driving became automatic for you. Now, you can carry on a conversation with your passengers on a road trip, or listen to a podcast on your morning commute. You can get from A to B with all the modern conveniences. Habits are hugely useful.

Sometimes….

Other times, habits land you in jail or a rehab center. Poor communication habits can destroy a relationship or bankrupt a company. Habits can destabilize nations. Consumerism is a collection buying habits. Practicing a religion is a sequence of habits. Examples are all around us; some good, some bad, some difficult judge.

For any given person, habits may decide the course of their life. A smoking habit can kill you. An exercise habit can make you healthy and fit. Eating sugary snacks does the opposite.  Some studies label 40% of our daily activities and decisions as driven by our habits.

...So what is a Habit?

The trigger, the routine, the reward, and the basal ganglia

Here’s what psychology knows about habits. When a behavior, or routine of behaviors, is triggered and then rewarded consistently, it becomes unconscious, automatic. The part of the brain associated with this automatic behavior is called the basal ganglia. Your conscious thought lives primarily in you prefrontal cortex. Whenever a trigger sets of a well-formed habit. Your prefrontal cortex hands the reigns over the basal ganglia, it conducts the behavior automagically (freeing up your prefrontal cortex to chat with your passenger or listen to your podcast), and finally a reward registers (the reward can be as simple as the car turning when you turn the wheel). As long as the trigger and reward are present, the habit remains in tact.

A word on effort

So, you want to change your habits, or form new habits. You might say:

• “I want to exercise more.”
• “I want to spend less.”
• “I want to eat healthy.”

Mmm... I don’t believe you. I would believe:

• “I want to be fit.”
• “I want to have money in the bank.”
• “I want to be healthy.”

The means to being fit is clearly exercise, and if you wanted literally to exercise, fitness would be a natural consequence. In fact, you'd hardly ever talk about it. I'm dissecting language here in order to make something very clear:

Changing your habits requires effort, like anything else.

For most of us, there is no surplus of effort. After a long day of work and the headaches and responsibilities that come with, there’s not much energy or discipline left to work at changing a habit.

That being said, there is probably no better long term return you can get for your effort than on changing your habits. To say it a different way:

Your desire to quit smoking needs to be greater than your desire to smoke that cigarette, and every cigarette after it.

Smoking is an extreme exactly, and addiction in addition to a habit, but I believe we've communicated the role of hard work in this.

In addition to hard work, you're going to need to find techniques that work for you. That's where I come in.

Triggers

Let's begin with Triggers.

New Habits

You need to learn how to plant triggers. This is just step 1. Alone this isn’t likely to create a habit, but let’s give it some dedicated focus here.

The role of a trigger is to bring a decision into your awareness The decision to smoke or eat a cookie perhaps. The decision to exercise or listen to your partner instead of yelling at them.

Let's look at examples of triggers. We'll start with straight forward ones and then get a little fancy (some will be specific, some will be generic):

1. A calendar reminder
2. An alarm
3. An alarm that wakes you up to the same song or motivational talk every morning.
4. A post-it note on your bathroom mirror that says, “Sweat before you showers” or “Earn it!” that reminds you to exercise.
5. Every time you look at a menu, choose the healthiest thing available to eat.
6. Every time you get in your car, do ______.
7. Every time you pass through a doorway, get up or sit down, check your pockets for keys, wallet and phone.
8. Every time you type a sentence, remember to put one space after the period, not two.
9. As soon as your mind starts having an anxious thought
10. As soon as you start feeling guilty
11. When you notice you’re yelling
12. When someone yells at you
13. When someone smiles at you
14. When you see a puppy
15. First thing in the morning
16. Last thing before bed

These are just a few examples. You’ll need to choose triggers that bring decisions into your awareness. If you’re trying to eat healthy, looking at a menu will make you aware of your decision to eat healthy or not. If you're trying to get fit, seeing that post-it note on your mirror will remind you to squeeze in a quick set of push ups and crunches, before you get clean for an evening out.

Old Habits

If you’re trying to break a bad habit, you’ll need to dig and dissect to figure out what is triggering it. Are you eating the chocolate bar because you’re hungry, craving sugar, or just because you’re bored? Does stress trigger your smoking craving? How about drinking, or being around other smokers? In theory if you can identify all the triggers and eliminate them, the habit will wear away. This turns out to be impractical for most things, so let’s look at routines and rewards...

Routines

Once the trigger puts the decision in your mind, well, that's when the hard work starts.

Time to tap into the effort we talked about earlier. Get on the treadmill, resist the sugar craving, distract yourself from the craving (distraction is incredibly powerful and awesome, kids use it all the time), smile, listen instead of yelling, don't smoke, ask the difficult question, wash the dishes before they pile up…

Uuuggghhhh, so much effort! (Don't worry, it's actually quite easy to reduce the effort requirements, we'll get to that shortly.)

The idea is to find routines that you like which accomplish what you’re after. If you want to lose weight running on the treadmill might do it, but running outside might be more fun, joining a soccer team might be even easier and as a side benefit interval running (which you do by default playing soccer) is actually quite effective.

Find the right routine. If something is just painstakingly boring, that’s not gonna work long run. If it's got horrid side effects, if it’s super expensive, you probably won’t be able to keep it up very long. Choose routines that accomplish what you’re after, but are fun or easy. Those are the ones most likely to help you succeed.

Rewards

What is the reward?

• The taste of sugar?
• The rush you get from digesting it?
• The way you look in the mirror after you exercise?
• The way your muscles feel after you exercise?
• The compliments you get?
• The “thank you for quitting smoking” your kid tells you every day?

If you’re forming new habits, you’ll need good rewards. Things you’ll appreciate and come to crave. If you’re breaking old habits, you’ll need to really dig and dissect to figure out what the reward really is for that bad habit. Do you drink to reduce stress or is a social pressure thing?

It is worth noting, don't use rewards that diminish the goal. If you want to be fit, don't reward your running each day with a bowl of ice cream.

Moments of weakness and the role of compassion

You will inevitably have moments of weakness.

When you fail…. When you binge on junk food, miss your workout, bankrupt the company…. Know that victory has never been closer. This is the moment of truth.

If you can stay the course in the darkest times, then nothing can stop you. Pray for the struggle to reach its precipice, the great fall, because victory is made in the decision to get up.

Don't believe for a moment that this requires strength!

It is not about toughness. Tough people get tough on themselves and eventually crumble under the weight of their expectations and let downs.

Reach deep within yourself and remember that compassion is at your core. If you are alive it is because someone, somewhere cared for you. Tap into that, and show yourself compassion. We are all a work in progress. The only thing that can ensure success is if we promise ourselves one simple thing:

We will go on!

If you can just try again when you fail, you will have tapped your greatest potential. Your progress to form a habit may have moments of weakness, but you won’t altogether quit trying. A month eating healthy with three full-day binges is a world apart from a week of healthy eating and then quitting forever, thinking the diet didn’t work; or worse, “that you’re a failure and shouldn’t try.”

Don’t promise yourself you’ll never eat junk food again, promise yourself you’ll never stop trying.

Also stop reading this... Right now. Go try to change a habit. If you can keep trying even when you falter, only then continue reading. If you can’t then read about compassion and persistence, then try again : )

Better Triggers

Smart triggers

Smartphones have some wild capabilities nowadays, you can get reminders at specific times, when you go to specific places, and lots of other ways.

Pairing up

Many of us set four alarms to wake up. If you’re having trouble noticing when you do your bad habit, try adding multiple triggers. (Note: If you can ignore multiple triggers, the problem is not with triggers.)

Make it catchy

Make your trigger memorable. Something quotable. “Choose the healthiest thing available and love it!”, “Do every exercise to fatigue!” Something exciting is more likely to enter your awareness. Something really wacky and weird is as well. “Buy apples instead of candy or a monkey will appear and steal your pants!” Try it before you judge. Oh, no look out for the monkey!

Piggy back on other habits

Sometimes you need to help a trigger set in. If you're learning a new language and you want to practice every day right before bed, grab a sharpie and write 'practica lingua!' on the handle of your tooth brush. After a while, practicing your language will become a natural follow on to brushing your teeth.

Better Routines

Are your routines getting stale? Are you not getting the results you want? What is your goal? Take the time to really hone in on what you’re trying to achieve.

Consult an expert.

If you’re trying to get fantastic results at something, you might need to spend the time to identify the winning behaviors. If you want to manage your money better, there’s probably a set of things you can do to achieve that. Rich Dad Poor Dad comes to mind. Identify the best routines for achieving the results you want.

In the same respect if you can’t figure out what you’re doing that is creating a bad result, you need to figure it out. If you have trouble attracting the type of man or woman you like, what is it you’re doing or not doing that’s preventing attraction? You’d be surprised what something as simple as eye contact can do. I’m no expert,.. so seek one out! Identify the right routines to get astonishing results.

Enjoy the process.

Even if you’ve found the ideal routine, swimming. You will lose weight at jealousy-inducing paces if you swim, but oh my how you hate the smell of chlorine! And you live in Kansas. Well then, I wouldn’t necessarily try to stomach swimming before trying something I loved doing that achieved the fitness outcome I want.

Chain routines together.

Let’s say you’re wanting to live a more active lifestyle. Don’t let one activity end without scheduling the next one. Finished one of those muddy obstacle races? Book the next one. Or send out an invite to 30 friends for a hiking trip. If you want, triple down. One activity ends, send out invites to three more in case one falls through.

Seek good side effects

Imagine running on a treadmill reduced your energy bill. Or going to the gym decreased your insurance premium. They usually don’t,... yet, but hey I we can dream.

If you build healthy dinner habits your teen-aged, junk-food-devouring kids are likely to benefit as well as you do. Maybe this is a better place to start, than healthy lunch habits that take you away from good co-worker networking opportunities. Look for routines with good side effects, and avoid those with bad side effects.

Better Rewards

If you have a bad habit of eating chocolate bars (two at a time) and you try to replace this habit, with running, and you use a small piece of chocolate as a reward, you’re in for a rude awakening. Your brain can do math! The part of your brain that likes the taste of chocolate will say to itself, “Running requires effort and produces less chocolate... What am I stupid!? Skip the run, just eat the chocolate bars.”

Let’s say you’re trying to get the family to stop watching TV every night. The kids never keep quiet while your shows are on anyway. Just try this:

Have the kids create a show one night. They write the script, they practice their lines, they make the costumes. Make popcorn, park on the couch and enjoy! Your kids will astonish you, and they're your kids so of course you’ll think the show was amazing.

Then, as we’ve learned a few paragraphs ago, schedule the sequel right away! Put it on the calendar, and give the kids time to prepare better, maybe the sequel will be even better than the original for a change. Maybe you film it, post it on YouTube and inspire other families to do the same. Maybe it goes viral, your kids get famous and score roles in real Hollywood movies! Okay, I’ve gotten carried away : )

This example was very involved but let's zoom in on the reward here. You enjoyed sitting on a couch watching a show (same as TV), but in addition you had the reward of watching your kids be creative. How cool is that?

Building Good Habits

Let's sum up the process for building a good habit:

1. Identify result you wan.
2. Identify the behaviors mostly likely to get that result.
3. Set up triggers and rewards for those behaviors or routines.
4. Check in and adjust triggers, routines and rewards.

Do not expect progress to be linear! For some things it might be, for others it is most definitely not. Weight loss is one of those. Depending on how you exercise you might be putting on muscle as your lose fat, that makes the mirror a better indicator of success than the scale.

Breaking Bad Habits

Let's sum up the process for breaking a bad habit:

1. Identify the triggers that drive your habit.
2. Identify the reward that you crave.
3. Define a strategy to stop your habit.
4. Check in and make adjustments

The strategy here is key. I'll give you the one I use, you're welcome to invent your own, of course.

Every time I notice I'm about to do my bad habit, whatever it is, I try to do the following things (if #1 fails I try #2, and so forth):

1. Refrain from doing the routine.
2. Name the habit.
3. Punish lightly.
4. Change my environment (sit somewhere else, play music, turn on the AC).
5. Change my physiology (eat food, do a set of push ups, rub my chest).
6. Change my psychology (watch a motivational video, listen to a few minutes of comedy on Pandora).
7. Be ready to fell and try again.

 

The Power of Choice

In the end, what we are doing by hacking our habits is taking control of our choices. We are making a decision about which of our unconscious choices we want to embrace and which we want to expunge, as well as which new choices we'd like to make automatically.

Few things will have more power in our lives than cultivating our habits. I hope you'll take on the challenge!

This is a preliminary draft on a much larger piece of work. If you feel it was helpful, please share your thoughts in the comments or email me directly: [email protected]. If you have constructive feedback, of course do share : )