Do you have a habit you’re trying to build? What about a habit you’re trying to break?
- Are you frustrated with your lack of progress?
- Do you fear you’ll never be able to make it work?
- Do you beat yourself up for lacking willpower?
- Do you find your motivation lagging when it gets tough?
Well, if summertime is about easy living, I want to help you live easy.
I want to help you learn to build habits without relying on willpower or motivation.
So here’s what we’re going to do: This is the beginning in a series about habit building the easier way.
And I want to start by taking a step back to talk about the anatomy of a habit.
All habits exist in “the habit loop” (see image above). So let’s talk about how understanding the Habit Loop can help you build good habits and break bad ones.
The habit loop is composed of three stages.
- The first is the trigger, which some call the cue or the context. Think of this as the when, it’s the thing that sets you off to perform the action or the habit itself.
- Then you have the routine. This is the automated behavior and this is the piece you probably think of when you think of a habit.
- Then finally, you have the reward. This is what your brain wants, and it’s what keeps you doing the thing.
Let’s make this more concrete with an example: Your morning coffee
- So, first, there’s the trigger: you wake up.
- Then there’s the behavior: you make and drink that coffee.
- And then you get the reward that boosts you that you get from the caffeine when you drink the coffee, or even the comforting taste of coffee if you drink decaf.
Now sometimes we have trouble recognizing is when there’s a reward in our negative habits.
So you might be thinking, “Well, what’s the reward for the things that I’m doing that aren’t very good for me?”
So, let’s look at another example: Let’s say you’re an emotional eater.
- First, there’s a trigger (likely a stressful situation)
- Then the routine is that you eat an unhealthy, yet very tasty, snack.
- The reward is that it tastes good and that you’re comforted in the short term, even if this isn’t helping out your long-term goals.
When you’re trying to change a habit, it can be really helpful to understand how the habit currently maps to the habit loop, but you also want to focus on changing only one element of the habit loop at a time.
Next up in this series, I’ll be sharing science-backed techniques to help you build and break habits.
But for now, you might want to map out one of your habits, and see which element of the habit loop might be easiest to work on first!