Why are Habits so Important?

Written By: Carly Burr

I’ll admit it, I bite my nails. It’s a bad habit. I’ve been doing it for as long as I can remember. No matter how many people mention it or how often I do it, it never seems to go away. It’s a habit that’s been ingrained in my everyday routine that’s awfully hard to break. Let’s be real: we all have these types of habits, and everyone thinks they’re never going away and don’t do anything to help them vanish. Well, today I’m going to discuss why habits are so important, and how you can break the ones that have been nagging at you all day.

Habits have an extreme influence on our behavior. Think about your daily routine and the habits you perform during that time. For me, it’s practicing gratitude, positive affirmations, and meditation every morning. Obviously it’s not something that I do 365 days a year, but I try my best to do it every day when life doesn’t throw me any curveballs. Some people may find themselves reaching for their workout clothes, brewing a cup of coffee, or scrolling on their social media for 30 minutes before they even get out of bed (I’m guilty of this one).

According to Psychology Today, habits become a part of our daily actions without any conscious awareness, meaning they are stored in our subconscious mind. They become “deeply ingrained in our neural pathways, making them difficult to modify or break”, and are formed through 4 stages: the cue, the craving, the response, and the reward. These stages are the backbone to every habit that you have, good or bad. First and foremost, the cue is what triggers your brain to initiate a behavior. Our prehistoric ancestors had cues that signaled them to things like food, water, and sex. In our generation, we mostly focus on cues that predict secondary rewards. For example, say you wake up feeling anxious every single morning. This problem triggers your brain to initiate a habit. Once the cue is triggered, the craving comes along. This is the motivational force behind every habit. Without any craving, there is no reason why you should perform whatever you're doing. You aren’t craving the habit, but rather the outcome the habit will deliver. So, when you wake up feeling anxious every day, maybe you start to crave meditation right after you wake up. Next comes the response, which is the actual performance of the habit. In this example, it would be getting up and meditating for 10 minutes. Lastly, there is the reward. This is exactly what you think it is, what good comes from the habit! Once you start meditating every morning, you slowly start to feel yourself not waking up anxious and stressed.

The example that I used above is a good habit, but the same four stages apply to bad habits too. Think about when you eat too much candy or watch too much TV at night. Although it may be deemed as “bad”, there is still a cue, craving, response, and reward. This can be very dangerous for many, and is where bad habits stem from.

So, how do we form good habits and break from bad ones?

Because habits are so influential to our behavior, our behavior needs to change to form a good habit or break a bad one. According to James Clear, there are four laws of behavior for both scenarios. To create a healthy habit, you should:

1. Make it Obvious

2. Make it Attractive

3. Make it Easy

4. Make it Satisfying

To make something obvious, you should physically place certain objects in your direct line of sight. If you want to start exercising more, lay out your workout clothes the night before. If you want to drink more water, pour yourself a large glass and leave it on the kitchen counter for you to see when you sit down the next morning. Think about this: if you leave a plate of cookies out on the counter, you’re likely to pick one up and eat it without even thinking. But if you switch those cookies with fruit, you’re making a healthier choice without even thinking twice. “You don’t need to be aware of the cue for a habit to begin”(Clear). You may pick up that piece of fruit and form a new habit without any conscious attention. Although that’s great, it is also what makes habits so dangerous; being able to create them so easily without even thinking.

Even if you make a habit obvious, if that habit isn’t appealing to you, you’re never going to want to perform it. In other words, you want to make the habit that you are creating exciting and fun, even if it isn’t. For me, I make doing homework attractive by going to my local coffee shop and ordering myself my favorite avocado toast and matcha latte. When I wanted to start exercising more, I bought myself cute new workout sets and found a friend that loved doing hot yoga with me. If you want to start reading more, pick books that are of interest to you. I found that when I forced myself to read non-fiction, I never wanted to pick up a book again. Now, I reach for that fiction book every night before I go to sleep because I find it intriguing.

Once you make the habit attractive, you want to start out easy. Not everything you do in life is easy, but if you start small and work your way up it makes the habit much easier to execute. If you want to start exercising more, just go for a 10 minute walk every morning. If you want to get into meditation, wake up 5 minutes earlier to do it. If you want to start eating healthier, try to add vegetables to one meal a day. This way, the habit won’t feel overwhelming, and you can slowly work your way up to the more difficult tasks. Something else you can do to make habits more attractive is temptation bundling. This is when you pair a habit with something pleasurable. Have you ever seen people walking on the treadmill while they’re catching up on their favorite TV show? They’re killing two birds with one stone, and incentivizing themselves to exercise more.

The last step to building good habits is making it satisfying for yourself. Think about a time where you were especially satisfied with a meal you ate. It probably tasted amazing and made you feel great. Did you find yourself craving that meal all the time? The satisfaction makes you want it even more. This completes the habit loop that you’ve formed, which therefore creates a new habit.

On the other hand, to break any bad habits you’ve formed, you need to do the opposite four steps.

1. Make it Invisible

2. Make it Unattractive

3. Make it Difficult

4. Make it Unsatisfying

Let’s use the example of breaking the habit of binge watching Netflix every single night. To make it invisible, don’t keep Netflix bookmarked and don’t have a TV in your room that's easily accessible. This way when you enter your room you have no signals to start watching TV. You can make watching TV unattractive by researching the effects of screen time on the brain. Next time you find yourself picking up the remote, remind yourself of what it’s doing to you. Next, make it difficult. If you watch Netflix every night on your computer, leave it charging in another room so that if you wanted to watch an episode of Grey’s Anatomy before going to bed, you would have to get up and physically get your computer. I don’t know about you, but when I’m cozy in bed it's pretty hard to convince me to get out. Lastly, make it unsatisfying. You can do this by having an accountability partner or just by holding yourself accountable. Make a rule that for every episode of TV you watch you have to put $5 in a jar. Or maybe you tell yourself that if you watch TV that night you can’t spend money on lunch at your favorite farmers market. When you make the habit unsatisfying, it makes you consciously think about what you are doing before you do it.

Do you want to start forming better habits? Here are some you can think about adding to your daily routine

• Write down 5 things you are grateful for every morning. You can leave your gratitude journal out on your bedside table so that you'll never forget to do it.

• Stay off of your phone for the first 30 minutes of the morning. Many researchers say that our minds are most impressionable right after we wake up in the morning. To do this, leave your phone in another room and invest in a good alarm clock.

• Go outside at least once a day! You can make it attractive by walking to your favorite coffee shop or going to the dog park with your dog.

• Read a book before you go to sleep. You can leave a book on your pillow before you leave your room in the morning so it’s right there when you get back.

• Drink half your body weight in water. Invest in a cute water bottle with a straw. This will make a huge difference.

Overall, habits are extremely important in our every day lives and really help us achieve our hopes and dreams. Although habits may seem like a very small change in your every day life, once you start to perform those every single day, it will make a large difference over time. Like James Clear states, if you focus on getting just 1% better every day for a year, you'll "end up 37 times better by the time you're done". But, if you get 1% worse every day, you'll decline down to zero.

Sources

• https://www.meaningfulhq.com/atomic-habits.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThe%20Four%20Laws%20of%20Behavior,4)%20make%20it%20satisfying.%E2%80%9D

• Atomic Habits by James Clear