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H Is for Habits

December 21, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

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.

B is for Baby Steps

November 9, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s excited about the idea of taking baby steps. Most of us want faster and bigger results. We want immediate gratification. We want to stop or start a habit in 21 days—preferably less. We want to overhaul entire areas of our lives by the end of the month. As soon as we think about something we want to accomplish—a project or a goal—we feel like we’re already behind schedule and disappointed it hasn’t yet come to fruition.

We’re impatient. And easily distracted. Not to mention overscheduled and stressed out.

Never mind that our unrealistic expectations keep producing the same unsatisfying results. Our inner voice insists we need to do—we should be able to do—so much more than take baby steps. Baby steps are just not enough.

Well, baby steps are more than enough. If you take them.

Go Back to Start. Do Not Pass Go.

Like most of us, you probably have a habit you’ve made more than a couple of unsuccessful attempts to change, maybe over a span of years or even decades. When you repeatedly try to change a habit (make a different choice) and fail, you don’t simply remain stuck in place. You actually end up worse off than you were before.

We tend to use our lack of success as evidence that there’s something wrong with us. Perhaps we have less willpower or self-control than other people. Or maybe we’re sabotaging ourselves. Or we don’t really want to change. We think the problem is us rather than the way we’re going about things.

The problem is that the more often you say you’re going to do something and don’t do it, the more you persuade your brain not to take you seriously when it comes to changing your behavior. Those multiple failed attempts reinforce the mental model your brain maintains. As a result, the status quo becomes even more entrenched, which makes it that much harder to change the next time you try.

Attempting to accomplish too much too soon is a recipe for failure because the chance of succeeding is miniscule at best. When you try to do too much or too many things at the same time, you’re giving yourself many opportunities to fail. Instead, you need to give yourself more opportunities to succeed.

Opportunities to Succeed

Taking baby steps puts you in a much better position to succeed. You can see your progress and build on your success. For one thing, it’s easier to take baby steps than it is to run sprints or leap tall buildings in a single bound. For another, it’s easier to add to the foundation you’ve built—no matter how close to the ground it may be—than it is to keep failing and having to start over again.

If you want to put a morning routine into place that includes a sequence of steps, pick one of them to start with. Don’t add anything else until the first one has become a habit. There’s no formula to determine how long it will take before a behavior becomes a habit. You’ll know when it happens because you’ll find yourself doing it automatically without having to remind yourself, and if you forget, a nagging inner voice will remind you to do it. Then you can add the second step. As you proceed building your routine, you’re likely to discover that it takes less and less time for the additional steps to fall into place.

If there’s a project you want to undertake that feels overwhelming, break it down into baby steps. When I was writing fiction many years ago, every time I sat down at my desk I felt like I was writing the entire novel. It was so daunting that I got very little writing done. So I decided I would fill two legal-pad pages every day, seven days a week. If I felt like writing more, I could, but two pages was something I could easily commit to.

Not only did those baby step lead to the accumulation of at least 14 pages each week, they also helped me turn writing every day into a habit.

If you want to develop a habit that involves doing something multiple times during the day, start out by creating an intention to do it once a day—or even every other day. Once you’ve succeeded with that, you can expand on it.

Dream Big. Take Baby Steps.

Lofty goals are great. But the way to achieve them is to break them down into manageable components and take one step at a time. The unconscious part of your brain resists change. When you attempt to make a big or an immediate change, it reacts by mobilizing forces to get things back on track. In fact, it responds the same way it does when your body experiences a sudden change, such as a drop in temperature, by trying to return it to homeostasis (the status quo).

If you want a new behavior to become status quo, you need to work up to it gradually without alarming your brain. Don’t give it anything to resist. The good news is that once your desired behavior does become status quo, your brain will work just as hard to maintain it as it did to maintain the previous status quo.

When you aim to do it all at once and miss the mark, you end up with nothing but a reinforced sense of ineffectiveness or inadequacy. But success breeds more success—and success is motivating. Learn to identify and take baby steps. It’s much easier than the alternatives—and it works.

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

Habits: Eating the Entire Bag of Potato Chips

August 24, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

A couple of years ago, I noticed that instead of following the same route (taking the same streets) to and from a particular grocery store, my habitual route was somewhat circular. After paying attention a few times, I realized that the route I’d ended up with involved more right turns than left turns, which meant it was ever so slightly faster. (If you know me, you know even the illusion of faster matters.)

A habit is a recurring, often unconscious pattern of behavior that is acquired through frequent repetition. Habits are acquired or learned over time. You can suddenly discover, as I did, that you have a habit you weren’t even aware of.

I may have consciously thought about making that initial right turn a few times at first, but I never think about it now. I’m satisfied with this habit, so I have no need to think about it unless I encounter an obstacle along the path. Goals, which I wrote about the value of last week, require ongoing System 2 intention from beginning to end. You’d be hard-pressed to complete a goal while your mind is otherwise occupied.

But habits only require System 2 attention until System 1 takes them over. That means that once a behavior or routine becomes a habit, it is initiated by your unconscious (System 1), usually as a result of something in the environment—a cue or a trigger. Your response is automatic rather than intentional or volitional.

Some other examples of habits are:

playing an instrument, if you’re trained
raiding the refrigerator in the evening
brushing your teeth before going to bed
biting your nails
eating the entire bag of potato chips every time
checking your email first thing in the morning

The word “habit” often elicits another 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.

Habits Are Immune to Your Opinion

Good habits, bad habits, 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.

Your brain creates behavioral 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. Habits are an energy-saving device.

The unconscious part of your brain (System 1) has one imperative, which is survival. However, it is only concerned with the short term: get out of the way of that bus right now! The fact that eating an entire bag of potato chips every time may have long-term negative consequences for your survival is of no concern to System 1. Up till now, eating the entire bag of potato chips has worked out fine. You’re still here. The status quo is status quo.

Maybe your cholesterol is becoming a growing concern. Well that’s conceptual; there’s no immediate crisis. Acknowledging and evaluating information about your cholesterol and deciding whether or not to change your diet requires System 2 attention. And then actually changing your diet requires more System 2 attention. In the meantime, System 1 continues running it’s program—in this case your habit of eating the entire bag of potato chips each time.

You think, What’s wrong with me? I know better. Or worse, and even less productive: I must be trying to sabotage myself. But the fact that you have information or that you know better has no direct or immediate bearing on your habit, which runs automatically whenever it is cued or triggered.

We experience this confounding situation over and over again because we tend to assume that behaviors are preceded by conscious intentions. You decide what you’re going to do and then do it. But only some behaviors are preceded by conscious intentions, far fewer than we’d like to believe. Estimates are that from 50% to 80% of what we do every day we do on autopilot, which means without conscious intention or volition.

You may be operating a 4,000 pound vehicle on a busy highway at a speed of 65 miles an hour or more while your mind is somewhere far, far away. This is especially likely to happen if you’re familiar with the route. You don’t need to pay conscious attention to your driving if nothing out of the ordinary occurs. You can zone out and your unconscious will generally get you to your destination just fine.

Your unconscious is doing exactly the same thing once you open the bag of potato chips. It’s getting you to your destination of eating everything in the bag. You don’t need to tell it to do that. But if you want it to not do that, you’re going to have to tell it over and over again until it rewrites the chip-eating program. You’re going to have to practice.

Repetition and Perseverance:
Practice, Practice, Practice

You would expect that the more a musician practices her instrument or the more dishes a chef 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.

When a musician shows up onstage to perform a violin solo, her habit of practicing ensures that her fingers know what to do with the violin. Without her habit of practicing, she might still be thinking about becoming a violinist or wishing it were so.

Changing or starting a new habit is no different. A musician or a chef wouldn’t expect to execute with complete skill the very first time. And the best musicians and chefs continue to hone their skills by practicing. So if you want to master not eating the entire bag of potato chips every time instead of just wishing it were so, all you have to do is keep practicing until it becomes automatic.

Should You Try
Living Without Goals?

August 17, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

No. Just no.

Yes, there are some folks out there who are quite insistent that instead of setting goals, you should put all your attention on your habits. It’s like advising a writer that instead of using nouns, she should put all her attention on verbs. We need both nouns and verbs. And we need both goals and good habits.

I’ve also come across more than a couple of people in the behavior-change field who seem to confuse goals with habits.

A goal is the state of affairs that a plan is intended to achieve and that (when achieved) terminates behavior intended to achieve it.

A goal requires ongoing conscious (System 2) attention. You decide what your desired outcome is (the new state of affairs), and then you create a plan to achieve it. Once you’ve achieved your goal, you don’t keep working toward it. You’re done. A goal has an end point.

A habit, on the other hand, is a recurring, often unconscious pattern of behavior that is acquired through frequent repetition.

Habits are created with or without your participation. If you want to start a new habit or change an existing one, you need to use conscious (System 2) attention initially. But once something becomes a habit, the unconscious (System 1) takes care of it. Habits are ongoing.

I don’t know why or how this either/or, black/white approach to goals and habits came about, but I first heard of doing away with goals in the 1990s when someone gave me a copy of Living Without a Goal by James Ogilvy. I recall reading a bit of it, attempting to give it a fair shake, but even back then I rejected the premise. Subsequently I’ve come across numerous spokespersons for the Zen-like attractiveness of the goalless life, which is especially prominent in the blogosphere.

What’s Wrong with Goals?

One of knocks against goals is that (horrors!) they limit you. Of course they do, but living without goals also limits you. You face limits no matter what you do because when you’re doing one thing, you can’t be doing four other things at the same time. If you board a plane for London, that’s where you’re likely to land even if you change your mind mid-flight and decide you’d rather land in Adelaide, Australia. Trying to keep all your options open doesn’t enhance your life, it keeps you from living it.

In addition to limiting you, another knock against goals is that they eliminate the element of surprise from your life. The idea that if you set and pursue goals life is going to stop surprising you is absurd.

In fact, you’re much more likely to be surprised (both happily and unhappily) once you set your plan into motion because you’ll be actively engaged in accomplishing something challenging. You may be uncomfortable, you’ll get feedback, you’ll learn new things, you’ll have successes and failures, you’ll have to make course adjustments, and you may even decide to change direction. So you may end up exactly where you hoped you would or you may end up someplace quite different. In either case, you’ll have had a chance to appreciate some new scenery and you’ll know much more about yourself than you would if you’d arrived there randomly.

Furthermore, you’re less likely to be surprised by life if you don’t challenge yourself because the unconscious part of your brain doesn’t like surprises. It wants you to be safe and secure, so it will attempt to keep you in your comfort zone, blissfully unaware of what you’re missing.

What’s Wrong with Giving Up Goals?

After considering their case, I’ve concluded the anti-goals folks get it wrong in four ways.

(1) They are unwilling to make a commitment.

When you commit yourself to one thing—especially to following through on a long-term goal—you agree to forego other things and to sometimes do things you don’t particularly feel like doing in the moment. If you want to change your status quo, you can’t just snap your fingers. You need to take action, you need to be persistent, and you need to figure out how to overcome obstacles. You don’t know ahead of time what your experience will be or how things are going to turn out. Doing something you don’t feel like doing now in order to have something you want in the future may not make you happy, but it’s more likely to enhance the satisfaction and meaning in your life.

Something else that comes across from many in the anti-goal camp is an almost pathological fear of measuring results. I’m sure that measuring results can be carried to an extreme, and when coupled with poorly thought-out goals (or goals determined by someone else), not particularly rewarding or even healthy. But measuring results is how you know when you’re getting closer to or farther away from what really matters to you. Why wouldn’t you want to keep track of that?

(2) They have a poor understanding of what goals really are.

What are the things in life that really matter to you? Your goals should not be ends in themselves, but rather the means of having more of what you really want. If you know what you want, you can either hope that doing whatever you feel like doing in the moment will get you there. Or you can identify goals that can get you more of what you want and then take steps to achieve them.

Many of the arguments for giving up goals seem to imply that once you create one, you’re somehow imprisoned by it. It’s true that a goal without a plan is just wishful thinking, but plans are only rigid if you treat them that way. The best way to approach a goal is by paying attention to feedback and adjusting course as needed. There’s nothing in the definition of a goal that prevents you from being flexible or responding to new information or insights.

Yet another misunderstanding about how to make setting goals more effective is the focus on the outcome rather than on the process. You need to identify your desired outcome so you’ll know what you’re aiming for and will be able to tell when you’ve arrived. But then you need to focus your attention on the steps it will take to get there: on the process. Focusing on the outcome will actually decrease the likelihood of achieving your goal.

(3) They have an inability to identify juicy, enlivening, and expansive goals.

Maybe the real problem is a lack imagination. If the idea of setting goals seems dry and boring to the anti-goal folks, they’re probably not setting the right goals. Maybe they haven’t yet determined what they really want and are still searching. They don’t understand that by undertaking challenges they can stretch their limits and expand their possibilities. They can learn just as much—if not more—than they can learn by meandering moment to moment.

If you do know what you want and have an idea about how to create more of that in your life, you’re likely to find working toward your goals exciting rather than tedious. Of course you won’t be excited about every single step and you won’t be excited every minute of every day. No one is. That’s where having a plan comes in handy. But if you’re not passionate about your desired outcome, let it go and find something else to work toward. Don’t throw out the entire concept of goals.

(4) They lack awareness about how the brain actually works.

Your brain is primed to create habits, but it is not primed to achieve goals. If you do the same thing, under the same circumstances, over and over again, it will become a habit. You will no longer need to focus conscious attention on it because your basal ganglia will have taken it over. Your brain loves repetition and routine. And the unconscious part of your brain actively resists change.

So if you want to change your status quo, which is what a goal is intended to do, you need to focus your conscious attention on completing the steps you’ve outlined until you’ve achieved it. Maintaining focus is not easy. It helps to have a plan that includes a means of measuring your results and rewarding yourself for your accomplishments. If you don’t get your brain to go along with your plan, your brain will get you to go along with its agenda. The unconscious part of your brain is much more interested in immediate gratification than it is in long-term satisfaction—which is why doing whatever you feel like doing in the moment is so appealing. Your brain is generally at the ready to divert your attention to any nearby bright, shiny objects. That means going with the flow is less a philosophical choice and more the path of least resistance of the unconscious part of your brain.

Don’t buy into the anti-goals rhetoric, even if you’ve had negative experiences with goals. Making effective use of goal-setting starts with knowing what you really want and making a commitment to go after it.

How Reward-Resistant Are You?

October 2, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

What’s the number one obstacle that gets in the way of people successfully changing or creating habits or accomplishing their goals? No contest! Resistance to identifying and using rewards is the clear and consistent winner.

Given our culture’s obsession with happiness, you wouldn’t think incorporating rewards into the change process would be a problem. Well, at least I didn’t anticipate how much of a problem it would be.

I’ve heard a number of explanations for this often deeply entrenched resistance. The two most common explanations are:

Accomplishing what I intended to do should be reward enough.
I can’t really identify any rewards.

Are You Reward-Resistant?

You may believe that accomplishment should be its own reward, but your brain doesn’t necessarily see it that way—and it’s the way your brain sees it, not the way you do, that matters. Sure some activities and accomplishments are intrinsically rewarding, but that’s not the case for all activities. Rewards help your brain help you accomplish the things you set out to do and turn desirable behaviors into habits. You can read more about how this works in Food, Sex, Drugs, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Habits.

Apart from it not being true, believing that everything should be intrinsically rewarding might be making it difficult for you to identify the rewards you’re currently getting. That’s why explanation number one and explanation number two often go hand-in-hand.

Most things you find rewarding (pleasant or enjoyable) can be used as rewards. So once you understand that rewards are rewarding, you can probably make a list of potential rewards. However, you might encounter another common obstacle: But I just do those things whenever I feel like it. That’s precisely the problem, and the result is that you may be rewarding yourself for behaviors you don’t want to perpetuate—thus actively perpetuating them—or for not accomplishing what you set out to do. It doesn’t matter whether or not that’s your intention. Unless they’re backed up by persistent action, your intentions (or lack thereof) and your opinions aren’t remotely interesting to your brain.

What Not to Do

Turning rewarding activities into rewards may seem unnatural at first. Say you decide your reward for completing a task will be to attend a movie, but you don’t complete the task. The way to get your brain to take you seriously is to not go to the movie. But it’s easy to rationalize why you should go to the movie anyway, especially if you made plans to go with other people. So it isn’t a good idea to set up rewards that involve other people, at least while you’re getting the hang of the reward process.

And don’t set something up as a reward if you know you’re going to do it no matter what. A reward needs to be something genuinely pleasurable—something you’ll miss if you don’t get to do it or have it—but not something you’re already committed to.

System 1 (the unconscious) is the impulsive part of the brain. It’s focused on immediate gratification, on what feels good right now. The more frequently you give in to the impulses of System 1, especially when you’re trying to implement a reward system, the longer it will take to be successful. Accomplishing long-term or even short-term goals and changing or creating new habits requires persistence and repetition—as well as restraint, which is a function of System 2.

Some of my clients are more successful than others at identifying and using rewards. Those who are successful are willing to engage in the trial and error process until they discover something that works. When you hit on the right combination, you might discover that rewards aren’t just effective, they can make even tedious projects fun. Here’s a great example, and one you can use as a blueprint for your own goals, projects, or habits.

Will Declutter for Plants

One of my clients has undertaken a major decluttering project in her home. This is a project she’s been attempting to complete for a while, so she’s tried many different approaches and strategies. Some were successful temporarily but not over the long haul. Others didn’t work at all.

But the system she’s using now seems perfect—not only because she has the reward piece figured out, but also because it’s based on acknowledging, rather than minimizing, baby steps.

For each 15-minute period of time she devotes to her decluttering project, she enters a checkmark into her daily planner. That provides her with immediate gratification (a hit of dopamine) and helps her keep track of her progress. For each checkmark in the planner, she puts one dollar into a jar, which gives her another hit of dopamine. The jar is clear glass and it’s in a prominent location so she can see the accumulating cash.

When she has enough money in the jar, she buys plants, which provides a bigger hit of dopamine at the time of the purchase and smaller hits when she sees the plants in her living space afterward. One thing that makes this reward system work is that she doesn’t allow herself to buy a plant unless she’s got enough funds for it in the jar. The system would break down if she spent money on plants that she hadn’t yet “earned.” Another thing that makes it work is the fact that the plants add to the pleasant ambiance her decluttering is intended to create in her home.

I think it’s pretty genius.

What do you think?