How To Change an Old Habit and Create Positive New Habits

Habits cause us to live our lives like a hamster on a wheel – unaware of what we are doing and simply chugging along. The question becomes, how can you change old habits and create positive new habits so that you are unconsciously building to your ideal life?

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit”                                                           

Aristotle

How Habits Form

We make thousands of decisions every day. If we had to stop and weigh every decision from which cereal to grab, which way to go to work, and how to handle conflict – nothing would get done and exhaustion would hit before noon. Plus, there wouldn’t be any mental power left to handle learning new skills or deal with priorities.

This is how habits are helpful. They take away the need to make hundreds of tiny decisions every day.

However, people are not usually conscious of the habits they are choosing. This is where bad habits can form and lead to a diminished lifestyle.

Donuts instead of fruits as a snack can lead to weight gain; TV over setting goals can lead to feelings of complacency; and frequently skipping on friend outings will lead to an inactive social life causing feelings of loneliness. These all come about because of the habits.

In the book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg, he explores personal habits, the habits of successful businesses, and the habits of society which explains how we all go through our day to day life.

It is an enjoyable read that I recommend for anyone interested in the science behind habits and how they impact everything from NFL teams, to the launching of Febreze, and achieving personal goals.

The first part of the book explores how habits work for the individual, and how people change them to make more conscious decisions in their lives.

The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

Habits are created in a loop.

• Cue: a trigger tells your brain to go into automatic mode and defines which habit to use
• Routine: which can be a physical, mental, or emotional action 
• Reward: which helps the brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future

Habits work in this repeating loop; if we see the same cue, conduct the same routine, and get a reward we deem worthwhile this will become a habit loop.

This loop can create positive habits such as having fruit for breakfast every morning, and it can also create negative habits, such as having a donut every morning. Both positive and negative habits work the same way.

Cue, routine, and reward.

By becoming conscious of this loop, we can learn to create new habits and change older, unhealthy ones.

How to Create New Habits

Habits are fueled by cravings. By cravings, Duhigg is referring to that feeling of wanting the reward. For runners, this is craving the dopamine rush (runners high) that sets in after several miles. For chronic overeaters, this is the desire to feel the sugar rush after eating a donut.

Cravings are what make cues and rewards work.

Cues and rewards is how new habits can be created. Put together a cue, routine, and a reward that is cultivated by a craving that can drive this loop.

For instance, if you want to start losing weight, figure out what reward will trigger a powerful craving. For many people that means weighing themselves each day and recording the visual process of seeing the number go down. This craving to see forward progress in weight loss is strong enough that the cues and routines that cultivate this trigger of the anticipation of losing weight.

It is about picking cues (weighing yourself) and routine (eating healthy) that causes the reward (losing weight) which is all carried by the craving (seeing the numbers drop).

How to Change an Old Habit

Duhigg calls this the “golden-rule of habit change”. Instead of changing a habit, keep the old cue, deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.

To illustrate this example, Duhigg points to why Alcoholics Anonymous can be successful.

• Same Cue: the person feels anxious or depressed
• Old routine: drink
• New routine: go to a meeting to relax and talk through your anxieties with the group
• Same reward: feeling happier and less anxious

Everything stayed the same except for the routine. Replacing unhealthy routines with healthy ones that lead to the same reward.

Creating a New Habit: Illustrated

To see if these concepts worked, I decided to try it to develop a mediating habit. This is what the set up was:

• Cue: Before going to bed, take five minutes to meditate. 
• Routine: Conduct a mediation practice. I offered myself the option to try different routines to see what worked for me.
• Reward: Feeling relaxed before bed
• Craving: the mental release and relaxation

What I found was that after several weeks of this habit loop, I started to subconsciously relax more throughout the day as well. In stressful moments, instead of tightening my jaw – I would loosen it. Something in my subconscious knew what I was craving was relaxation in moments of stress.  

It also became a mental release. No matter how challenging the day was, there would be five minutes before bed that I could decompress.

Stopping an Old Habit: Illustrated

I was gaining weight when I graduated from college. I knew the lifestyle had changed but there had to be something else as well. After cultivating my meditation practice, I realized I was losing weight. What happened?

Turns out, one of my habits to cope with stress was to stress eat salty snacks. By doing breathing exercises instead of reaching for cheese-its, I overrode this bad habit. I always thought I was snacking because I was hungry. That explains why when I tried to replace salty snacks with healthier nuts, I ended up just eating all the nuts instead.

It turns out I wasn’t hungry, the reward I was looking for was a stress relief. That was why eating nuts didn’t work in replacing the salty snacks habit. 

• Cue: feeling stressed
• Old routine: eat junk food
• New routine: take three deep breathes
• Reward: feeling less stressed
• Craving: the relaxed feeling

Meditating turned out to be a keystone habit for me, which are actions that cultivate “small wins”. These help other habits flourish by creating new structures, and they establish a culture where this change becomes contagious.

Main Take-Aways:

• Habits are not mysterious; with some quiet reflection, we have the ability to recognize every habit we have. The cure, routine, reward, and craving that silently work together can become quite obvious over time.
• Creating new habits is all about creating an easy cue, routine, reward, and craving that promotes this healthy behavior. 
• Fostering keystone habits can lead to systematic habit change in our lives

I would recommend this book to you if:

• You want to learn more about keystone habits, how organizations create cultures, and how habits affect society.
• If you want more illustrated examples with further analysis on how to change habits.

Action Items

• Analyze a bad habit you have that you want to change. What is the cue, routine, reward and craving? How can you keep the cue and the same reward, but change the routine? This will take some experimenting. The reward might not be what you think it is. Keep experimenting with it and identify the reward. Then foster a healthier routine to get that same reward.