Habit forming
As the new year approached last month, my inbox was filled with books, articles, TED talks, and podcasts aimed at weeding out bad habits and growing good ones. We are what we do, and we do countless, repetitive things daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly — consciously and unconsciously. These habits get us on the road (or not) to our intentions, so giving them an annual tune-up keeps us in good working order. A couple of resources that have been on my radar for awhile are worth sharing.
The power of small
James Clear was seriously injured in high school when a baseball bat slammed into his face. In the process of his long recovery and quest to regain and realize his full potential as a baseball player, he developed small but consistent habits over time that he credits with his college academic and baseball triumphs and subsequent business success. He spent years singularly focused on studying and sharing everything he could find about habits, which led to his habit guru status and NYT bestseller, Atomic Habits. He begins the book with his definition of these words, which underscore its fundamental premise that tiny changes over time lead to big results:
atomic 1. an extremely small amount of a thing; the single irreducible unit of a larger system. 2. the source of immense energy or power
habit a routine or practice performed regularly; an automatic response to a specific situation.
His book is cultivated from “a synthesis of the best ideas smart people figured out a long time ago as well as the most compelling discoveries scientists have made recently.” While it provides a step-by-step operating manual for better habits, I was sold by its fundamentals that mastery is based on:
The compounding effect. “It’s easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis. . . . if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you're done.” Writing a page a day turns into a book. Just putting on workout clothes gets us to a workout, and the regular habit of workouts gets us in shape. “The most powerful outcomes of any compounding process are delayed. You need to be patient.”
Systems not goals. A goal is just an ideal unless there’s a system for getting there. It’s also a moment in time while a good system is ongoing. “If you’re a musician, your goal might be to play a new piece. Your system is how often you practice, how you break down and tackle difficult measures, and your method for receiving feedback from instructors. . . . You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.”
Identity not outcomes. “The most effective way to change your habits is to focus not on what you want to achieve, but who you wish to become.” Clear offers the example of two people in the process of quitting smoking turning down a cigarette. The first says, “I’m trying to quit,” while the second says “I’m not a smoker.” The first person identifies as a smoker, while the second person has shifted identity. “Smoking was part of their former life, not their current one. They no longer identify as a smoker.”
What he calls the “backbone of the book” is a “four-step model of habits — cue, craving, response, and reward — and the four laws of behavior change that evolve out of these steps,” derived from work in the 1930s by BF Skinner, and more recently, another NYT Bestseller, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. Clear also draws from Stanford’s BJ Fogg, who just released Tiny Habits.
If you’re more of a class-taker than a book-reader, Clear offers the Habit Academy, a 40+ lesson course for building better habits.
Pay attention
Judson Brewer, an associate professor at Brown University’s School of Public Health and Medicine and the founder of MindSciences applies mindfulness to breaking bad habits. In his HBR piece, How to Break Up with Your Bad Habits, Brewer tells us “. . . self-control has been promulgated for decades, despite the fact that researchers . . . have shown that the brain networks associated with self-control . . . are the first to go “offline” when faced with triggers such as stress.” Over 20 years studying behavioral neuroscience “helped me find a surprising natural way to do this: mindfulness.”
Mindfulness works like this: people attempting to quit smoking are told to pay attention to what the cigarette tastes and feels like when they smoke. The point is to make the smoker aware of the real “reward value.” Through attention-paying, smokers can shift from the existing reward value to experiencing cigarettes as tasting and smelling bad. Brewer and his team have tested mindfulness apps aimed at smoking, overeating, and anxiety, and the data show “significant, clinically meaningful results: 5X the smoking quit rates of gold standard treatment, 40% reductions in craving-related eating, and a 63% reduction in anxiety.”
Brewer believes using mindfulness is broadly generalizable. There are three steps: first figure out what triggers an unwanted habit — what starts us heading toward procrastination or stress eating or lighting up a cigarette? Next, get clear on what we get out of those behaviors. Pay close attention and break it down to bust up the reward value. What do we get out of surfing social media or eating or smoking? The final step is to use curiosity to “find a new reward that is more rewarding than the existing behavior. . . . People often learn, pretty quickly, that cravings are made up of physical sensations and thoughts, and that these come and go. Being curious helps them to acknowledge those sensations without acting on them.”
You can find the apps and support for tackling eating, anxiety, and smoking habits at MindScience. His book The Craving Mind details his research and methods.