Habits Pt. 2

Habits are building blocks of your personality and action, I continue to believe in that statement; I don’t disagree with a lot said in my previous Habits post (except for the way it was articulated), but I have since then read a book titled The Habit Cycle by Charles Duhigg. I’ve learned more about habits, how they work, and in this post, I’ll attempt to disseminate that knowledge by going over habits once more.

As I said in the previous post, habits make up who you are, they make up most of the things you do on a daily basis. Habits are things that happen in automatism, they are things you do often without thought, and may include actions, thoughts, sensory stimulation, and other things. Habits can be beneficial, innocuous, or injurious; habits can also form from personal will such as exercising every day or outside forces such as the schedule of school or being raised to brush every morning. What I’ve learned since the last post, however, is that habits follow a certain cycle.

The way that habits work is a three-part cycle: cue, routine, reward. There is a cue, something that occurs that triggers you to do something, then there’s the routine, this is the thing you do, and the reward, something you get out of doing the routine. If you brush every day, the cue is waking up, the routine is brushing, and the reward would be the nice feeling in your mouth when you’re done (toothpaste companies put things in their toothpaste just to make it more satisfying when you’re finished to exploit this habit cycle).

There are certain habits that affect other areas of your life, these habits are known as keystone habits. An example would be if you slept for eight hours a night, this makes you less aggressive, more productive, and leaves you more rested. They cause chain reactions; keystone habits can have very helpful or grievous impacts on your life, so choose your habits carefully as they can carry you, or destroy you.

Another thing I’ve learned is, habits, once they’re formed, are very challenging if not impossible to completely destroy. Let’s say you smoke, if you just up and quit smoking, you’ll either relapse, injure yourself severely through withdrawal, or just have a very tough withdraw time. Instead, the best way to get rid of a habit you don’t want is, find the cue for the habit, for smoking the cue usually yearning for the nicotine hit or stress, and the reward is the hit of nicotine along with a possible shot of dopamine; find your personal cue and reward for the habit you want to break, and the next time you feel the cue come up, instead of doing the thing you want to stop, do something that will give change the routine, and still provide a reward, instead of lighting the cigarette, eat a piece of candy, it will provide you with the same reward of dopamine, and a nice taste. With time, you can replace a habit, completely destroying a habit cue and all, however, is near impossible, it’s much more recommended that you replace the routine, which at times, may change the reward too.

To create habits, use the same process with the added element which is “the path of least resistance.” Say you wanna jog in the mornings. The cue is going to be waking up, now you have to set a routine, let’s apply the path of least resistance and put your sneakers in front of your bedroom door. Now, after you brush and get ready before you leave your room you’ll see the sneakers and be able to put them on, and since they’re already on, you can convince yourself to go for the job, and promise yourself something when you’re done, such as breakfast. Sometimes you can set temporary rewards, like a piece of candy, or a certain food, however, find a way to transition out of rewards that will drain your pocket, or may harm you, like the excess candy or food.

That’s habits pt. 2, I really enjoy part twos that are updated with objective knowledge instead of my simple meandering thoughts, which sometimes is or isn’t true. Anyways, I hope this post helped explain habits and some of the science behind it. Now you can set up those new years resolutions and stick to them, I wish you all luck, and hope you can see them through, and use this post to help you with it. Thank you guys for the last week off, have a wonderful week, and I’ll see you the next.

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