A Guide To Handle Habits
Habits guide the actions we take and actions define the course of our lives.
Understanding the mechanisms behind habit formation and employing effective strategies for building positive habits and breaking negative ones is essential for personal development and self-improvement.
Let’s first understand habits.
Habits are like computer programs coded in our mind’s operating system that execute automatically in response to specific cues or triggers.
Anything we do effortlessly can be considered a habit.
From things as small as walking to something as complex as doing maths in mind, if it happens effortlessly then it’s a habit.
But habits are different from reflexes.
Reflexes are biological activities in response to stimuli like the reaction on touching a hot pan.
Habits are related to neuroplasticity (learning process), which establishes connections between neurons. The stronger the connection, the stronger the habit.
Why are habits formed?
Our brain is very lazy, even lazier than us. So, it tries to automate things to minimize the conscious thought or effort required.
This process of automating daily practices by our brain is termed “Automaticity” in neuroscience.
And this automatic response pattern is what we call habits.
How Habits Influence One’s Life?
Habits are not something to be ignored.
Habits are the things that everyone should monitor closely as these are the building blocks of our character, behavior, and most precisely our whole life.
As Aristotle said:
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
Our habits directly influence our actions, decisions, and ultimately, our success and failure in various aspects of life.
Observe any successful person, you’ll find that they’re very strict with their habits and are constantly looking forward to working on their practices. They all are on a continuous journey of self-improvement.
Look at Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor known for his Meditations on Stoic philosophy which is the result of his habit of journalling and continuously assessing his day-to-day activities.
Habits like exercising, meditation, and reading are common in most successful people.
These habits are the keystone habits that affect things like perception, perspective, and decision-making by which they direct their lives as they want.
If habits are mastered, then success becomes inevitable.
Habits are the samskaras (symbolically Drona) that guide us (symbolically Pandavas) for the coming battles of our life as described in the Bhagwat Geeta, chapter-1 verse-2.
Fundamentally, habits decide men’s futures.
Now, to handle habits, we first need to understand how habits are formed.
The Formation Of Habits
Habits are the outcome of repetition and reward.
Whenever the cycle of repetition of any task triggered by a cue or specific context followed by a reward like a dopamine hit occurs, habit formation starts.
Over time, repetitive actions lead to the strengthening of neural pathways in the brain making it a permanent habit.
The cycle goes like this:
Trigger -> Behavior -> Reward
The time required for a habit to form varies from person to person.
Some can form a habit in 18 days while others can take up to 254 days.
This variation is due to limbic friction (as Andrew Huberman says), the resistance that arises due to various factors like tiredness and anxiety.
Limbic friction is like the threshold in a chemical reaction that is needed to be crossed to carry out the reaction. And to overcome this threshold, the energy required is called “Activation energy”.
As activation energy for each reaction is different, similarly limbic friction varies from person to person and within a person.
For instance, if a person is anxious then the limbic friction for him to do meditation is very high but the same stress works as a trigger for him to smoke.
So, habits can be formed either negatively or positively from the same context. But our tendency to form a bad habit is way more than forming a good one.
This brings in the concept called context dependency.
Each habit is somehow dependent on a context like the habit of brushing our teeth is linked with morning or bedtime routines.
This context dependency works like a trigger for habit formation and sustains them.
It can also be utilized in the monitoring of our habits.
Let’s dive into the process.
Building a Habit
To build a habit successfully, regular repetition and monitoring are required.
Here I’m not providing a process but some strategies that helped me and which you can make use of too.
1. Make Habits a Necessity
Don’t start your day until you haven’t performed the task.
Until and unless you’ll not make a conscious effort to build a habit, you’re not gonna make it.
Just fix a time slot in your busy schedule and do it regularly without a skip unless there’s an emergency.
In case you miss a day (try not to), then do not penalize yourself on the other day by doing extra hours, as doing so can negatively affect your mind making it hard for you to continue.
2. Build Different Habits in Different Phases
Our nervous system tends to generate behavior based on the state or activation level of the mind due to certain chemicals such as Serotonin, Dopamine, and Oxytocin being released in various phases of the day.
These variations in the activation level of the mind across the day can help us in dealing with limbic friction.
We can divide our day into 3 phases:
- Phase.1 [ First 8 hours]: In this phase, our mind is hyper-focused and alert. So, the habits that pose high limbic friction or need high activation energy can be performed.
Habits like exercise, studying, and meditation can be built in this phase. - Phase.2 [9 to 15 hours]: This phase shows a drop in the activation level of our mind.
So, habits having a medium level of limbic friction can be built like reading, and practicing a skill not learning from the base. - Phase.3 [Last hours]: The activation level of our mind is at its lowest in this phase and we’re stressed out.
So, habits that require less energy and have less limbic friction can be formed. Habits like journaling and reading can be formed.
Also, this phase can be utilized to break habits too.
3. Lower The Threshold
The higher the resistance, the lower the chances of our actions.
Like we use a catalyst to lower the threshold of a reaction and make it occur sooner, similarly, we can lower the limbic friction for our habits and make its execution easy. But how?
When I was in the process of building a habit of reading, I struggled a lot at the start. I found it difficult for me to even sit for 15 min a day.
So, to lower the limbic friction I started to develop my interest by reading novels. Also, I fixed a routine of reading before sleeping and kept books near my bed to lower the effort required.
By lowering the effort required and fixing a time, now I’ve successfully built the habit of reading.
We can also lower the limbic friction by visualizing the activities before performing them. This gives our mind a clear idea about the process making it easy to carry out a habit.
But visualization works on fewer people.
So, you can try the following concept of linchpin habits.
4. Use Linchpin Habits
Linchpin habits are habits influencing other habits.
Like the habit of eating while watching TV or listening to audiobooks and songs on morning walks.
This is also referred to as Habit Stacking.
By making one habit the trigger of another habit we can easily build a new habit while maintaining an old habit side-by-side.
If you’re trying to build a habit of drinking more water, then you can stack it with exercising or running. Or stacking the practice of meditation with morning rituals.
Linchpin habits help us go a long way.
5. Rewards, Errors & Punishments
One of the oldest methods of building a habit is using a reward and punishment system.
The same concept is used in the training of AI models and even in the training of animals.
But this system comes with cons.
If on the deployment of this system someday you skip to reward yourself, then this will break the pattern and send a signal to the brain to no longer repeat the habit.
Or if you punish yourself for missing a day, then this will increase the limbic friction for that activity making it tough for you to continue.
More concisely, if the brain expects a reward and a reward comes, then it will continue the habit. Or if a reward comes unexpectedly, then it will boost the process.
But if a reward is expected and it doesn’t come, then this will immediately break both the pattern and the process.
So, use it carefully.
Breaking a Habit
Breaking a habit is tougher than building one.
The older the habit, the older the neural pathways, and the harder it is to break them.
But the things that make it difficult to build a habit can also make it difficult to continue a habit. I’m talking about using poison to kill poison.
1. Increase Limbic Friction
Since limbic friction can resist us to carry out a good habit, then why can’t it resist the continuation of a bad habit?
If you eat a lot of junk food, then stop using home delivery apps that will increase your efforts to go and buy one.
But the increase in the level of effort must be such that it must overcome the dopamine hit that you were getting from that habit.
2. Breaking the Cycle
As habits continue in the cycle of trigger, behavior, and reward, breaking this cycle or stopping the trigger can help in breaking a habit.
Instead of controlling our repetitive behavior (which is hard to control), we must stop the cycle from being triggered.
The events that are working as a trigger to certain habits must be identified and minimized.
If stress is the trigger for the smoking habit, then one should start working on stress management along with controlling the habit that will break the cycle and also one’ll learn to handle stress.
3. Punishments & Rewards
Punishments provide resistance while rewards encourage.
Some people have the habit of snapping a band on their wrists whenever they do a task that they want to leave (for example cursing).
Also, rewarding yourself for not performing certain tasks can break those habits too.
4. Swapping Habits
Replacing bad habits with good ones is the best way, as it breaks a bad habit and develops a good one.
But one thing must be kept in mind, the habit that is replacing the old one should not have higher limbic friction.
When I was trying to break the habit of using my smartphone before sleep, I swapped it with reading. First I started reading ebooks on my phone and then finally switched to hardcopy.
The transition or swapping of habits needs to be smooth otherwise your brain is smart enough to catch you red-handed.
Testing The Bond
Now, the final stage is to assess the strength of your habits.
Once you’re at a stage where you think that you’ve successfully developed a habit, start testing that habit against limbic friction and context dependency.
After your habit is fully developed in one of the three phases we discussed earlier, start moving that habit throughout the day and check if still you can do it.
Doing this will test the habit against context dependency.
One another criterion to test the bonding of the neural pathways is to check if the limbic friction required before and after habit building is decreased or not.
If you’re feeling the same amount of limbic friction then you’re still in habit building phase.
You can do these tests for 21 days to confirm if a habit is formed or not for 5 to 6 things simultaneously.
But continuous monitoring of your habits is essential.
That’s all you need to handle your habits and take your first step towards conscious living.
Remember:
There’s no purpose in life greater than understanding life itself.
_ Paras
