“Are Habits Dangerous?” — How To Not Get Into A Rut But Stay Flexible

Making sure that our routines and habits are still serving us

Light And Shadow

Habits are the cornerstone of consistency and discipline.

Once we have repeated a behavior for a certain period of time (on average after 66 days), it has become a habit.

We usually don’t question things anymore. We just do things without thinking.

We just go to the gym. We just meditate. We just plan our day. We just reach out to clients regularly. We just write every morning.

Things are automatic. We do them if we feel like doing it or not. If we are motivated or not.

We have become disciplined.

This is the great upside of habits.

However like light and shadow, each upside also brings some downsides.

Are Habits Dangerous?

The biggest problem with this automaticity is that as we do things on autopilot, we might stop paying attention to little errors.

In the beginning, when we were focused on consistency, this was not a problem.

However, over time, as we reach a certain standard of how we do things, little errors might creep in.

We might journal for a year, writing down one line every morning, but not really getting anything out of it.

We meditate for a year, but don’t really catch ourselves drifting of to return to our breath.

We stop improving. Things stale, or even become worse.

What we need is a system that allows us to regularly monitor our habits, make tiny improvements and ask ourselves if they are still serving us.

James Clear calls this concept “Deliberate Practice”.

In Atomic Habits he gives the formula:

“Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery”

The idea is to not only put in the repetitions but also make a conscious effort to reduce errors and make small improvements.

Reducing errors is very similar to the Japanese concept of “Kaizen”.

For our habits that means how can I reduce distractions, how can I show up more often, how can I reduce temptations and losing focus…

Deliberate practice is similar as well. It is about improving your behavior a tiny bit every time.

How can I be more present and focused during my habit? How can I increase the duration of my mediation? How can increase the difficulty of what I’m doing?

If you improve by 1% every day, you’ll be more than 37 times better than when you started. This is the power of marginal gains.

So to make sure that our habits still serve us and keep improving we need a form of reflection and review.

This self-awareness will give us clues about our performance over time and helps us to hold ourselves accountable.

One tool that works great is journaling.

We can use it to ask ourselves review questions on a daily or weekly basis:

Daily:

• What was good about today?
• What could I improve?
• Did I stick to my habits?
• Did I make an effort to become 1% better?
• What errors can I reduce tomorrow?

Weekly:

• How was my average performance this week?
• How did my habits contribute to that?
• Are my habits in line with my current goals?
• Did I stick to and improve my habits a tiny bit this week?

Habit Revamp

Once per month, in line with the preparation for the upcoming month, I recommend doing what I call a “habit revamp”.

This means to get clear about all the habits that you are currently following and review them.

Ask yourself:

“Are these habits still serving me?”

“Do I need to shake things up, make improvements and adjustments?”

“Do I need to drop some habits and implement different ones?”

“Are these habits helping me to become the person I want to be?”

Especially the last question is very important. It helps us to see if we are on track to living like the person that we want and claim to be.

James Clear takes a similar approach in his “Integrity Reports”, where he reviews once a year if he lived up to his values.

In the end, we need to make a habit out of the way we want to behave.

Then it will become automatic and part of our identity to live in line with our values and become the person we want to be.

Beware Inflexibility and Dependance

One of the biggest downsides of habits is that as we start to enjoy the structure and routine they give us, we might become dependent on them.

We start to become inflexible and can’t function if we don’t have our proper morning routine.

We are dependent on our surroundings and that everything is the way we are used to.

Depending on our lifestyle this might be a problem. Especially if we’re traveling regularly, be it for leisure or for business, this rigidity and dependence on a structure are what rob many of their productivity and consistency.

We are in a new environment, we have different schedules, we sleep worse and can’t have the food that we want.

Best-selling author Ryan Holiday struggled with that too.

As he found, the key is to not be dependent on a single routine, but have several routines, adaptable to different situations.

There might a routine when you are traveling on the road, another one when you are in an Airbnb and a different one when you are preparing for a business meeting.

You don’t have to create entirely new routines, but just adapt the one you already have to the current circumstances.

Think about which things you can do no matter where you are and which help you to prepare for the day.

What comes to mind are meditation, cold showers and even journaling (on your phone if you can’t bring your physical notebook).

Also, the principles of making it easy for you to stick to habits as well as implementing triggers stay the same.

Even if there is a new environment, you can adapt it to make it work in your favor.

This might only possible 80/20 style, (what are the 20% of changes to my environment, that give me 80% of the results) but this is good enough.

If you are traveling irregularly, just focus on keeping up the consistency in a very small way and trust that you can get back on track to your full routine once you are in your usual environment.

If you are traveling and are in new environments more regularly, then come up with back up routines that can be done anywhere.

If you can follow certain habits only under certain circumstances, they most likely shouldn’t be part of your identity anyway.

Ryan summarizes it like this:

“Discipline is a form of freedom, but left unchecked becomes a form of tyranny.

So the key is the ability to rotate from routine to routine, discipline to discipline, according to the needs of the day and the moment. Not so rigid that you can’t respond to the moment, not so free that you can do everything in the moment.

Otherwise, you’re not only going to be miserable…you’re an easy opponent to defeat.”

Trust your ability to get back on track and be flexible.

Allow yourself to embrace chaos and change. Life is constant change.

The more we embrace it the more we are at peace.

Because remember:

“This too shall pass.”