Master the Habit Loop to Break Bad Habits

and Build Better Ones

50,917

Alan Henry
Profile

Alan Henry
Filed to: Mind Hacks

Psychology
Habits
Behaviors
Habit loop
Routines
Cues
Rewards
Goals
Productivity

10/04/12 4:30am

Share to Kinja
Share to Facebook
Share to Twitter
Go to permalink

There are plenty of tools to help you build better habits, but in many ways it really comes down
to willpower and understanding the mental process behind how behaviors turn into habits. Over
at 99U, they call this the "habit loop," and the key to breaking bad habits is tricking yourself into
swapping out the habit you want to pick up for the one you want to drop.
The habit loop itself is straightforward: you receive a cue of some kind, you address the cue
through a behavior, and you reap a reward for your behavior, either mentally or physically. What
you want to do is fix the behavior, instead of trying to remove the cue or the reward, the way
many of us do. Here's an example from the article:
If you want to get rid of a bad habit, you have to find out how to implement a healthier routine to
yield the same reward. Let's say you like to go out with your coworkers at the end of a long day
and have a few drinks. In this situation, there are actually two rewards: (1) the socializing that
inevitably occurs, and (2) the relaxing effects of the alcohol on your nervous system.
Both of those rewards are valid and necessary. If you remove drinking from your life, but replace
it with nothing else, you'll likely be unhappy. The trick is to keep the cue (e.g. tired after a long
day) and the rewards (e.g. social time, relaxation) while changing the routine (e.g. drinking).
They go on to point out that the key to fixing the bad habit in this case isn't in giving up entirely
on the socialization and the relaxationif you do that, you'll just make yourself unhappy and
alienate yourself from your coworkers, and therefore more likely to slide back into your old
habits. They suggest instead trying to get one of the coworkers you go drinking with to do
something elserunning, yoga, rock climbing, anythingthat gives you the same rewards and
is triggered by the same cue. Whatever you do, the key to success is to fix the routine without
breaking the other elements of the loop.

In the workplace and in life, we are little more than the sum of our habits. Who we are and what we
accomplish depends largely on a vast network of routines and behaviors that we carry out with little to
no thought whatsoever. As neuroscientist David Eagleman writes in Incognito, Brains are in the
business of gathering information and steering behavior appropriately. It doesnt matter whether
consciousness is involved in the decision making. And most of the time, its not.

Habits are the brains own internal productivity drivers. Constantly striving for more efficiency,
the brain quickly transforms as many tasks and behaviors as possible into habits so that we can
do them without thinking, thus freeing up more brainpower to tackle new challenges. In general,
this modus operandi of our minds leads to incredible benefits. But, on occasion, it makes it seem
nearly impossible to break bad habitsor integrate new oneswhen we dont know whats
happening inside the black box of the unconscious.
In The Power of Habit: Whey We Do What We Do in Life and Business, writer Charles Duhigg
does a deep dive into the science of habits to explain how they work and how we can change
them. Its a fascinating read that crisply breaks down the habit-formation process, andperhaps
more importantlythe habit-changing process.

How Habits Get Formed.

When we first engage in a new task, our brains are working hardprocessing tons of new
information as we find our way. But, as soon as we understand how a task works, the behavior
starts becoming automatic and the mental activity required to do the task decreases dramatically.
Think about how much brainpower and concentration you had to use the first time you parallel
parked or even the first time you tied your shoelaces. Then compare that to the amount of mental
effort you exert doing those activities now.
Duhigg writes, This processin which the brain converts a sequence of actions into an
automatic routineis known as chunking, and its at the root of how habits form. There are
dozensif not hundredsof behavioral chunks that we rely on every day.

How Habit Loops Work.

Habits consist of a simple, but extremely powerful, three-step loop. Heres Duhigg:
First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use.
Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward,
which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. Over time,
this loop becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become intertwined until a
powerful sense of anticipation and craving emerges. How to Change a Habit.

The first rule of habit-changing is that you have to play by the rules. That is, theres no escaping
the three-step loop (e.g. cue, routine, reward) because its hard-wired into our brains.

If you want to get rid of a bad habit, you have to find out how to implement a healthier routine to
yield the same reward. Lets say you like to go out with your coworkers at the end of a long day
and have a few drinks. In this situation, there are actually two rewards: (1) the socializing that
inevitably occurs, and (2) the relaxing effects of the alcohol on your nervous system.
Both of those rewards are valid and necessary. If you remove drinking from your life, but replace
it with nothing else, youll likely be unhappy. The trick is to keep the cue (e.g. tired after a long
day) and the rewards (e.g. social time, relaxation) while changing the routine (e.g. drinking).
An alternative routine could be to convince a co-worker or friend to start exercising with you
after workrunning, yoga, rock climbing, or whatever works for you. Then you have a healthy
routine (exercise) that replaces the negative routine (drinking) while yielding the same rewards
(social time, relaxation).
If you want to get rid of a bad habit, you have to find out how to implement a healthier routine to yield
the same reward.
When youre trying to get the new routine integrated into your life, dont be afraid to dwell on the
rewards. Its actually a good thing. Duhigg writes:
Want to exercise more? Choose a cue, such as going to the gym as soon as you wake up, and a reward,
such as a smoothie after each workout. Then think about that smoothie, or about the endorphin rush
youll feel. Allow yourself to anticipate the reward. Eventually that craving will make it easier to push
throughout the gym doors every day.
Of course, its not quite that simple. As we all know, forming new habits is hard. Just because youre
telling your brain that theres a reward, doesnt meant the habit will stick. It only really sinks in when
through enough repetitionyour brain comes to crave the reward.Countless studies have shown that a
cue and a reward, on their own, arent enough for a new habit to last. Only when your brain starts
expecting the rewardcraving the endorphins or sense of accomplishment-will it become automatic

to lace up your jogging shoes each morning. The cue, in addition to triggering a routine, must also
trigger a craving for the reward to come.
But thats still not everything. Weve all managed to implement new habits for a month or two, only to
have them compromised when were under extreme stress. If we truly want to avoid backsliding into
our old ways, theres a final key ingredient: Belief. For a habit to stay changed, people must believe that
change is possible. And most often, that belief only emerges with the help of a group, says
Duhigg.Taking the classic example of one of the most effective habit-changing organizations ever,
Alcoholics Anonymous, Duhigg continues:Those alcoholics who believed that some higher power had
entered their lives were more likely to make it through the stressful periods with their sobriety intact.

It wasnt God that mattered, the researchers figured out. It was belief itself that made a
difference. Once people learned how to believe in something, that skill started spilling over to
other parts of their lives until they started believing they could change. Belief was the ingredient
that made a reworked habit loop into a permanent behavior.
Groups create accountability and beliefkey ingredients in helping us stick with new habits.
Thus, if you want to write more, consider joining a writing group. If you want to run more,
consider joining a running club. The more positive reinforcement you can surround yourself
with, the easier it will be to make difficult changes.
-

For a more in-depth look at how habits underpin the success of individuals from Michael Phelps
to Martin Luther King and companies like Target and P&G, check out The Power of Habit.
Being aware of how our habits work is the first step.

Whats Your Approach To Habits?

How have you found success implementing new habits or getting rid of old ones?
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit. Sobering words from
Aristotle, and an astute reminder that success doesnt come overnight. On the contrary, its discipline
that gets you from Point A to the often elusive Point B.

In our day-to-day lives, habits can often be tough to build, as there are plenty of distractions that
can lead us off the straight and narrow and right back to our old ways. To alleviate some of
those troubles we can examine some academic research on motivation, discipline, and habit
building, and break down their findings into actionable steps that any aspiring habit-builder can
put into place.

1. Make micro quotas and macro goals

In a fascinating study on motivation, researchers found abstract thinking to be an effective

method to help with discipline. In the most basic sense, dreaming big is pretty good advice
after all. And since a variety of research around the self-determination theory shows us that
creating intrinsic motivators (being motivated to do things internally, not through punishments or
rewards) is an essential process of building habits that stick, you need to find a way to balance
this desire to dream big with your day-to-day activities, which often do not result in quick,
dramatic changes.
The answer is to create what I call micro quotas and macro goals. Your goals should be the
big picture items that you wish to someday accomplish, but your quotas, are the minimum
amounts of work that you must get done every single day to make the bigger goal a
reality. Quotas make each day approachable, and your goals become achievable because of this.
Writer/developer Nathan Barry has made for a great case study of the use of these quotas as
someone who forced himself to write 1000 words per day come hell or high-water. The result
was three self-published books resulting in thousands of dollars in sales.
2. Create behavior chains

Creating sticky habits is far easier when we make use of our current routines, instead of trying to
fight them. The concept of if-then planning is built around environmental triggers that we can
use to let us know that its time to act on our habit. Also known implementation intentions, this
tactic involves picking a regular part of your schedule and then building another link in the
chain by adding a new habit.
For instance, instead of I will keep a cleaner house, you could aim for, When I come home,
Ill change my clothes and then clean my room/office/kitchen. Multiple studies confirm this to
be a successful method to rely on contextual cues over willpower. So the next time you decide to
eat healthier, instead try If it is lunch time, Then I will only eat meat and vegetables.
3. Eliminate excessive options

According to a variety of research on self-control and expounded upon in books like The
Willpower Effect there is great power in being boring. Take, for instance, Barack Obamas
insistence on never wearing anything but blue and gray suits. According to the president, Im
trying to pare down decisions. I dont want to make too many decisions about what Im eating or
wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.
The presidents belief is well supported by the researchKathleen Vohs and her colleagues
study on self-control found that making repeated choices depleted the mental energy of their
subjects, even if those choices were mundane and relatively pleasant. According to the Harvard
Business Review, if you want to maintain long term discipline, its best to Identify the aspects of
your life that you consider mundane and then routinize those aspects as much as possible. In
short, make fewer decisions.

For lasting change, the steps you take must ultimately change your environment and schedule.
Stop buying snacks if you want to stop snacking (no willpower needed), pack a very similar
lunch every day of the week, and embrace the power of routine to get the necessary done each
day.
4. Process plan (but dont fantasize)

The step that many people skip when they fantasize about building a certain habit is they never
clearly answer why they want the change to occur. It may seem like a small detail, but it plays a
huge role in keeping our motivation up over time. A variety of research shows us that excessive
fantasizing about results can be extremely detrimental to the stickiness of any habit.
According to this study from UCLA, the mistake is in what we visualize. Researchers found that
those participants who engaged in visualizations that included the process of what needed to be
done to achieve the goal (ex: fantasizing about learning another language, by visualizing
themselves practicing every day after work) were more likely to stay consistent than their peers
(that visualized themselves speaking French on a trip to Paris). The visualization process worked
for two reasons:

Planning: visualizing the process helped focus attention on the steps needed to reach the goal.
Emotion: visualization of individual steps led to reduced anxiety.

5. Eliminate ah-screw-its

New habits are often very fragile, and it is for this reason that we must eliminate any source of
friction that may lead us astray. These ah-screw-it moments (hat tip to blogger Derek Halpern)
are the specific moments where you find yourself saying, Screw this, its not worth the effort!
A more scientific take on this phenomenon is called the What the Hell Effect, which explains
why we are so likely to abandon ship with a new habit at the first slip-up.
The solution? Examine your habit and find exactly where things start to break down. In a great
example of putting this in action, Author and 99U speaker Ramit Sethi has explained how he
improved his gym attendance by finding where things would slip:
When I sat down to analyze why I wasnt going to the gym, I realized: my closet was in another room.
That meant I had to walk out in the cold [to] put on my clothes. It was easier to just stay in bed. Once I
realized this, I folded my clothes and shoes the night before. When I woke up the next morning, I would
roll over and see my gym clothes sitting on the floor. The result? My gym attendance soared by over
300%.

You can even incorporate an if-then scenario once you find the culprit. For instance, if fatigue
is stopping you from playing guitar after work, you could set up a system of If Im feeling tired
after work, then I will take a 20-minute nap and listen to music for five minutes to get myself
motivated.

We all have lousy habits. Things wed like to do, or know we should, but just dont seem to happen:
exercise, diet, productivity or flossing longer than a week after the visit to the dentist.

In that sense, Im like most people still a work in progress.But, unlike most people, Ive had on
ongoing obsession with figuring out how to fix those lousy habits. Ive spent thousands of hours
being an experimental guinea pig, uncovering surprising findings, such as:

Implementing a daily exercise plan is easier than exercising 3 times per week
Changing 10 meals will change 90% of your eating habits
Learning a new skill or language can be accomplished with 5 minutes a day

I dont expect most people to replicate my, perhaps unhealthy, obsession with selfexperimentation. Instead, I want you to save years of trial and error so that you can fix bad habits
without frustration.

Why Bother Changing Habits?

My obsession came from a simple idea: with the right conditioning, you could automatically do
what you normally need willpower for.
Many people make a commitment every January to start exercising. And, by February, many of
them have already given up. Thats because sustaining good behaviors normally takes a lot of
effort.
But with habits, you dont need willpower, they just happen. This concept that everything I
currently spent so much effort on could be made effortless had huge appeal. Even if perfect
automation were impossible, if you could make those behaviors much easier then life would
become more enjoyable as well.

How to Change a Habit

The first principle is a conditioning period. This is a period of time when you put in effort to
make the habit automatic.
A good way to think of the conditioning period is like a rocket entering orbit. It takes fuel to
escape gravity, but if you use the right trajectory, you can enter into an orbit, which prevents you
from falling back to earth. The goal with creating a habit is to reach orbit (habit) before you run
out of fuel (willpower).
Also like a rocket, how you handle the conditioning phase can make a huge difference. A poor
trajectory, and you may waste tons of fuel and never reach a stable orbit. The right approach,
however, can make the habit change relatively easily.

1. Set a conditioning period.

My practice is to set the default conditioning period for 30 days. Too short, and youll fail to
reach orbit. Too long, and you wont summon the initial motivation to overcome gravity.During
those first 30 days, your goal is simple turn the behavior into a habit. It may take longer than
30 days (studies show 66 is a closer mean for true habituation), but this is the period of complete
focus.
Making a habit is a different goal than many people have when they first start behavior changes.
In most cases, people are after results they want to lose weight, get a promotion, or master a
skill.
But forming a habit is different than getting results. Some of the tactics Ill describe are lousy for
getting results, but perfect for quickly conditioning a habit.
What many people fail to realize is that getting results is much easier once you already have the
habit. Being fit is easy if you show up to the gym every day. Being a skilled writer is easier if
youre already writing each day. Habits precede success.
Action Step:

Focus on a 30-day conditioning period.

2. Make the habit every day.

Another mistake people make is believing that performing a behavior 3 times a week is easier
than doing it every day.In a nave way, this makes sense. After all, if you spend 30 minutes every
day at the gym, that takes 3.5 hours per week time out of an already busy schedule. Going
twice, in contrast, only takes 1 hour. Therefore if youve struggled to stick to exercising, going
twice weekly is probably the best first step.
The problem with this logic is it assumes time is the most relevant factor. But aside from rare
cases, time is almost never the factor. For most people, if you added up all the wasted moments
of procrastination, distraction or gaps between work, there would be more than a few hours left.
If time isnt lacking, then why is it so difficult to find the time?
The reason is that we may be able to find the time, but not the energy. Going to the gym, when it
isnt a habit, requires willpower. After a busy day, you probably dont have a lot of spare
willpower.
Focusing on a daily habit, instead of 3 times a week, is better because the conditioning is
stronger and the habit becomes automatic faster. Since every day you exercise, it quickly
becomes an automatic part of your routine.

I went through four conditioning periods before the habit of exercise finally stuck. After I did,
the habit stuck for 6 years, so that I no longer need to exercise every day to sustain it. Exercising
daily was the difference between the first three failures and the eventual success.
Action Step:

Make the habit daily.

3. Strategically replace your biggest lost needs.

Through a conditioning period and daily habits, you alter your trajectory to make it more likely
youll reach orbit before you run out of fuel. Replacing lost needs is a way of reducing gravity
itself so you are less likely to slide back to bad habits in a moment of weakness.Think of how
many diet books exist. Each of them claims some magical cure for losing weight, and each
promises to be easy to follow. Now think of how many people actually stick with them. What
gives?
Part of the problem is that diets focus only on removing bad habits, Dont eat that! But this
leaves a vacuum, which tends to pull people back to lousy ways of eating.
The rationale behind this advice is that people want as much variety as possible otherwise why
would restrictive diets be difficult to follow?
Ive found a different answer. People dont want variety. In fact, Id wager that the top 10 meals
of the average person constitute 90% of what they end up eating. If variety were so important,
why do people always eat the same meals?
When I switched to a vegetarian diet five years ago, I focused less on what I shouldnt eat, and
more on creating a new list of Top 10 meals. If I could replace my menu with meals that fit my
desired eating habits and taste buds, then my willpower would only be necessary for the less
common occasions of eating outside that menu (such as restaurants or family dinners).
Action Step:

If youre giving something up, focus on replacing the most common 80-90% of that habit.
4. Begin with the start in mind.

Woody Allen famously quipped, 80% of life is showing up. With habits, Id guess its even
higher.The trickiest part of starting a habit is the first step. If youve got that handled, the rest
usually flows smoothly.
This is easy to understand intuitively. Exercising is mostly about that first step into the gym.
Writing is mostly about opening up that blank page. Overcoming procrastination is mostly about
the first five minutes of work.

What I learned in creating habits was that this knowledge could allow anyone to make their
conditioning efforts vastly more efficient. If the first step required the most conscious control,
then habituating that first step would cover most of the habit itself.
This means that learning a new skill or language doesnt need to begin with commitments to
invest dozens of hours each week. Simply committing to starting for five minutes every day
conditions you to get used to performing the habit.
Once the conditioning period is over, its much easier to scale up your efforts, than to build the
habit from scratch.
Since the conditioning period is a race between reaching orbit and running out of fuel, this
principle has drastic implications. Conditioning the first 5-15 minutes of a habit takes a tenth of
the effort, so even for stubborn habits, you can make them automatic before worrying about
performance.
One way to do this is to commit to only the first step of your habit in the 30-day trial, with the
rest being optional. For example, committing to jogging every day, but not committing to any
specific workout length (allowing you run for just 15 minutes if you really have no time).
The advantage of this approach is that even though your commitment is minimal (5-15 minutes),
in practice youll probably do the entire habit most of the time. This lets you leverage a bit of
willpower to get larger results.
Action Step:

Focus on making the first 5-15 minutes of your habit your must during the first 30 days.

Results from a Habit-Obsessed Life

After repeating this process dozens of times, the intuition is that it would turn you into a robot.
Youd be so obsessed with performing your habits, that you wouldnt have space for spontaneity
or fun.But my experience actually taught me the opposite knowing how to change your habits
gives you freedom. Like the discipline of the pianist frees him to play any song, the initial ability
gives new flexibility.
Knowing how to create habits lets you put your energies into other pursuits. Id rather put my
time into figuring out how to write better, than worry about meeting my quota, or how to be
stronger than guilt myself for missing the gym.
If theres one thing Ive learned in my experimental odyssey, it is that were all governed by
habits. The difference is whether you control your habits, or whether they control you.