How to Form a New Habit: A Step-by-Step Guide
Throughout our lives, we form and break countless habitual patterns. And when it comes to habits, our brain treats them all the same, whether they’re good or bad. Through the formation and discontinuation of habits, we can actively change our life. And that’s why it’s crucial to understand the science of habits, so that we can take control and change our lives for the better.
The Science of Habits
As the popular wisdom goes: change is hard. And for good reason. Our brain is comfortable with set patterns and once set, they’re difficult to disrupt. Many times we reinforce our habits without consciously thinking about it. It’s only when we want to change our habits that we really notice them.
Anyone who’s ever attempted to break a bad habit or start a new habit can attest to how difficult those changes can be. Things like learning a new hobby, starting a new diet, changing our exercise routine, or quitting smoking or drinking. All of these behaviors look different on the outside, but at the core, they are all run by habits.
There is a certain magic in a habit. Once established, they run in the background of our brain, triggered by various cues or stimuli in our environment. We can see these in small behaviors, such as how we sleep on the same side of the bed or eat at the same time every day. And habits can become so routine that we do them without even thinking.
Ever left the house and wondered if we shut the garage door or turned off the coffee pot? That’s habits at work. As soon as our brain is triggered by a specific cue, it launches into the behavioral sequence we’ve trained.
It seems like a simple formula, creates a cue, attaches a behavior, gets a reward. Yet, as we’ve all encountered at some point, creating or breaking a habit can be much harder. But understanding the steps means we can use them to form new habits and successfully break them as well.
Step 1: Pick One New Habit
Since the brain resists change, forming a new habit requires willpower. But willpower depletes over time, which means doing something willfully and deliberately becomes harder day by day. This is called ego depletion and is the main reason most of our habit-changing resolutions fail––our focus and drive lessens with time until we stop doing them.
Knowing that our willpower naturally depletes, trying to do too many changes at once is only going to deplete much faster. While it may seem like an all-or-nothing approach to creating a healthy lifestyle is the best approach, it’s actually better to start with a single step. Add thirty minutes of exercise each day until it doesn’t require constant effort and diligence to complete. Then we add the next habit. By doing incremental changes, we ensure success, with each new habit building on the next.
Step 2: Be Specific
Vague terms don’t work with our brains. We need to be specific about the exact habit we want to introduce. Let’s continue with the previous example, getting more exercise. It’s an open-ended statement, making it difficult for our brain to connect it with a concrete set of actions.
Instead, we should be specific. Committing to exercising for 15 minutes every day is better, but making a plan to walk for fifteen minutes every day after work is better. It becomes easy for our brain to link getting off of work as a consistent, specific trigger, making the habit that much easier to form.
Step 3: Tie It To Established Habits
Therapists have long helped people quit smoking by tying healthy habits to finishing a meal. Since smokers often report wanting to smoke after they eat, it is easier to replace one habit with another since the trigger is already formed.
If we get off of work and the first thing we do when we get home from work is change clothes. We can use that existing habit as the established trigger to prompt exercise instead of relaxation. Instead of putting on casual clothes, we can change into workout gear. This way, our new habit flows from an old set of behaviors into a new set.
Step 4: Add Material Cues
Material objects or sensory cues work better than non-verbal or verbal reminders when it comes to training your brain for a new habit. Having a physical cue makes it harder for our brains to ignore. It can be easy to turn off an alarm or forget a verbal reminder, but visually seeing the reminder means we can’t forget or shut it out.
Continuing with our exercise habits. If we put our gym clothes in the bathroom before we go to work. Or on our bed. Maybe even on top of our television or in our favorite chair. Someplace that makes it impossible to dismiss. This process also helps ensure we aren’t depleting any more willpower than is absolutely necessary. We want to make as few decisions as possible, making it easy to simply start the behavior instead of finding excuses to not.
By providing the brain with material objects (workout clothes) to associate with the new activity (walking), we are forming new neural pathways in our brain, ensuring we continue the habit.
Step 5: Consistency
This is probably the hardest step, yet it’s also the most crucial. Once we’ve focused on our new habit, have laid out the cues, and have engaged in the behavior, it’s imperative to continue performing these new actions deliberately and mindfully every day.
Depending on the context and the complexity of the habit, it can take anywhere between three weeks to three months for a new habit to become fully ingrained and automated. But here’s the catch––several studies confirm that even if we have to skip a day or two, it doesn’t affect the overall process. As long as we continue doing it deliberately as soon as we are able.
Conclusion
Change is a necessary part of life. Only by changing older patterns that no longer help us, can we move on to improved versions of ourselves. Rather than trying to tackle huge change or define a habit in vague terms that make it difficult for our brain to track, embrace change little by little, through simple steps. Remember, slow and steady wins the race. Before long, we’ll have an entire new set of healthy habits in place.
