We’ve all been there: we start doing something and before you know it, we’ve developed a habit. A daily cup of coffee. Picking up breakfast at the drive thru. Vegging out in front of the television after work. Just a habit. However, in a lot of cases, we don’t understand how these habits are formed. They just happen. So today, we’re going to figure out how habits happen and what you can do about it.
How Habits Happen
Matt Ragland has a cogent YouTube video on the subject of habit formation. It looks at habit formation in the cue, response, reward formation. In my previous article on learning, you might recognize this as the Operant Conditioning model. Operant Conditioning states things rewarded happen more frequently than things not. However, the question becomes: why do we build bad habits?
CUE
Monkey see, monkey do. Okay, so you’re not a monkey, but you get the idea. Cues are all around us. However, everything is not a cue. The reason for this is everything doesn’t have meaning. Classical Conditioning is at work in the cue portion of a habit. You have to have an association for the cue to work.
My wake up cue is the sounds of my cats calling for breakfast. It only works as a cue because I associate needing to feed them with needing to get up. As you can see, I handcraft my morning starting from that cue.
Fixing cues can be both easy and difficult. You can remove a cue from your environment or avoid a cue. However, cues are usually not the part of the habit which needs fixing.
RESPONSE
Responding to a cue is what often gets us into trouble. For example, the cue is anxiety, the response is whatever makes the anxiety go away because the reward is relief from the anxiety. This could mean running away from the problem, smoking, etc. anything which offers relief. Controlling your response is crucial to habit building.
REWARD
Firstly, the human brain gets a reward both for pleasure and the relief/avoidance of pain. So, if your habit does one of those two things, you are more likely to keep doing it. If it does both of those things, you are REALLY likely to keep doing it.
Secondly, your brain (and mine) is wired to consider now over later. So the thing giving you the pleasure now (a donut) wins over pleasure later (a workout to look better).
These two things help to control the strength of a habit.
What You Can Do About It
You can edit or remove the cue. You can change the response. In some cases, you can change the reward but not all. Here’s how to fix a habit.
First, catalogue the habits you have. Here we come into the Dear Lab Rat phase. You have to know where you are before you can know where you’re going. In this section, make sure you are noting down, the cue, response, and reward for each habit. Otherwise, you won’t know what or how to tweak things to work for you.
Cue: I’m tired.
Response: Coffee.
Reward: Not tired anymore.
Be extremely careful here because some habits are almost invisible. They are the architecture of our daily lives; therefore, you have to be on the lookout!
Second, consider one habit you want to change. Don’t worry, you can work on others after you’ve got one down. Failure often comes from taking on too much at one time. Since you know the cue/response/reward of this habit, you can then decide where you want to put your effort.
Third, write down your new habit and follow it to the letter until you don’t have to look at it anymore to make it happen. Habits are supposed to be practically invisible. They structure things like the steel girders beneath the façade of a building.
Observational Learning
When we look at how habits happen and what we can do about them, we often forget to talk about observational learning. Everything we know doesn’t come from our own experience. How does this help us in habit formation: emulation. Find someone to emulate. Children are masters at this. If you’ve ever seen a video of a child who learns how to say the wrong word after it is said one time, you understand how emulation works.
So observe (in some way) those who do the things you wish to do.
Putting all three types of psychological learning together: Classical (Associational), Operant (Reward based), and Observational (emulation) together, you can create quite a powerhouse of habit change.