Habit Loop Archives - Farther to Go!

In order to create or change a habit, you have to retrain your brain. Your brain, however, actively resists your attempts to retrain it, viewing your interference as not only unwelcome but also potentially dangerous. Fortunately, as far as your brain is concerned, history indicates you’re not very adept at this retraining stuff. Plus you usually give up way too easily and quickly. So your brain doesn’t consider you much of an actual threat.

There’s something to be said for your brain’s point of view. But it’s not good news for you. Your habits can either provide the scaffolding that supports your endeavors or they can completely derail you. They affect every aspect of your life. If you want your life to be a consistently satisfying and meaningful one, you need to be able to reliably manage your habits.

Here are five facts to help you understand habits from your brain’s perspective.

1. Your Brain Has the “Habit” Habit.

It is primed to turn behaviors into habits, with or without your participation, in order to save energy. Habits make up the bulk of your behavior.
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Your brain does not share your opinions or judgments about whether your habits are good or bad. As far as your brain is concerned, any habit is a good habit.
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To succeed: Use your brain’s “habit” habit to your advantage instead of letting it run unfettered.

2. Habitual Behavior Is Unconscious.

Once a behavior becomes a habit, you no longer have conscious control over it.
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The fact that you understand the benefit of doing (or not doing) something has absolutely no impact on the part of your brain that runs your habits.
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To succeed: Communicate with your brain by your actions, not by your thoughts and good intentions. Your brain responds to repetition and persistence.

3. Your Brain Is Predictive Rather than Reactive.

Your brain is constantly trying to figure out what’s going on, what it means, and what you should do about it.
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By the time you’re aware you’re about to do something, you have less than two-tenths of a second to veto your brain’s directive.
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To succeed: Since your brain is always planning ahead, you have to plan ahead, too.

4. Habits are More than Behaviors.

Habits consist of three parts: a cue or trigger, a routine (the actual behavior), and a reward. This is known as the habit loop.
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Your brain is motivated to move you toward anything it finds rewarding.
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To succeed: Accept, understand, and use your brain’s reward system.

5. Your Brain Is Profoundly Averse to Change.

Your brain uses its considerable processing power and speed to maintain the status quo.
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To change the status quo, you must have a very compelling why (10 on a scale of 1-10).
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To succeed: Identify your desired outcome, not just your objective! (How is your status quo going to change once you successfully create or modify a particular habit?)

The good news is that once you’ve created a positive new habit or changed an existing negative one, your brain will dedicate itself to maintaining your new status quo just as zealously as it did the old one.

Habits are recurring, generally unconscious patterns of behavior you acquire through frequent repetition or that are learned over time. Since they operate outside conscious awareness (and control), you may suddenly discover, as I have, some habits you didn’t know you had.

Your brain creates habits, with or without your conscious participation, in order to operate more efficiently. It chunks repetitive behaviors and turns the chunks over to the basal ganglia so you don’t have to waste your precious and limited System 2 attention on them. So the habit habit is actually a labor-saving device for your brain, which means your brain is primed for habits.

Since we tend to identify with our conscious brain rather than our unconscious, we’re under the illusion that most of what we do is the result of conscious choice (behaviors are preceded by conscious intentions). So you may not be aware of how pervasive habits are in your life.

When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. —Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit

Habits vs. Goals

Habits differ from goals in two significant ways:

Goals are temporary; whether it’s three weeks or three years, there’s always an end point. Habits, on the other hand, are ongoing.
Goals require conscious attention from beginning to completion. Habits, once in place, use System 1 attention. That’s why you may be unaware of some of your habits.

Creating a habit you want (or changing an existing habit) does require conscious attention initially, but only until System 1 takes it over, at which point it is initiated automatically as a result of something in the environment—a cue or a trigger.

Continual repetition of behaviors and thoughts results in highly reinforced neural connections, which are experienced as habits. …By adulthood, most emotional responses and behavioral impulses are conditioned: we think, feel, and behave more or less the same in the same states and social contexts over and over. Habits and the conditioned responses that compose them are processed in the brain in milliseconds, thousands of times faster than conscious decisions. —Steven Stosny, Ph.D.

According to Charles Duhigg, there are three parts to what he refers to as the habit loop: the cue, the routine, and the reward. The cue is what triggers the routine—the beginning of the habit loop—and the reward lets your brain know the loop is complete.

Habits: Good or Bad?

The word “habit” often conjures up the word “bad.” If you think of habits as bad—or as just something inconsequential that you do—you’ll have a harder time creating the habits you want to have.

Whether your habits are “good” or “bad,” they’re all the same to your brain. It doesn’t care what you think of your habits. All it cares about it is being efficient. Do anything often enough and it will become a habit. And habits, by their nature, are hard to change. Trying to exert willpower, using positive thinking, engaging in deep soul searching, or looking for the underlying cause of a habit are all fruitless endeavors. Unfortunately, you can’t have a heart-to-heart with your basal ganglia.

The main reason that conscious control of habits is limited is that it requires the most easily exhaustible and metabolically expensive of mental resources: focused attention. …When resources are limited, people are unable to deliberately choose or inhibit responses, and they become locked into repeating habits. …The autopilot, being virtually inexhaustible, wins the struggle more often. —Steven Stosny

The Value of Habits

It’s easy to see the positive, productive role of habits in the development of a skill or craft—that of a musician, an artist, a writer, a quilter, or a cook, for example. We generally expect that the more a musician practices her instrument, the more dishes a cook prepares, the better they will become at doing those things. A musician is unlikely to attain excellence if she only practices when she’s in the mood for it. Skillful musicians develop the habit of practicing regularly whether they’re in the mood for it or not. And they don’t have to be in the mood for it precisely because they’ve developed the habit. They don’t have to waste conscious attention or drain self-control resources by thinking about or deciding each time whether or not to practice.

Because habits don’t drain self-control resources to the same extent as non-habits, once a behavior becomes a habit, it frees up your conscious attention and makes achieving goals considerably easier. Habits and routines are actually essential to people who need to be creative on a regular basis.

Changing the status quo isn’t easy. The unconscious part of your brain, which might be said to be allergic to change, is way ahead of the conscious part, especially in familiar situations. It’s built to predict what’s likely to happen next, construct multiple response scenarios, and initiate the response it considers the most effective—not the response you consider most effective.

That’s why habits seem to have so much power. They are very familiar to your unconscious, which bases its predictions and responses on previous experience. You may want to go for a walk after dinner, but if you’ve been plopping down on the sofa every evening, your brain is going to “choose” the sofa over the walk. You may want to cut back on the donuts, but if you’re in the habit of grabbing one with your coffee at the office, that’s what your brain is programmed to “choose” to do.

You can make use of the power of habit by learning how to change the ones you don’t want and by creating habits you do want. In order to change an existing habit, you need to identify the cue and the reward and substitute a different behavior (routine) that gives you the same reward. To start a new habit, first decide what the behavior will be, and then choose a reward and a cue. It’s easier to start a new habit if you make the cue something you already do on a regular basis. Charles Duhigg explains the process in his Guide to Changing Habits.

One major caveat: There is no magic number of days that it takes to change or create a habit. But there is a highly effective type of magic you can apply; it’s called perseverance.

Part of the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.

Habits: The Dirty Lowdown