Habit forming — or, traversing automata

We all recognize the importance of habits and routines in our daily lives, but why is it that there’s friction in introducing new steps or changes to our routines?

Personally, it’s been tough for me to get started in turning over a new leaf — which makes New Year’s Day a nightmare. Not so much because I’m intimidated or unmotivated, but because I’m not quite sure how it’ll affect my day-to-day. Will I get enough time to still catch up with friends adequately? Or maybe to finish that book that I’ve been wanting to read?

There are a lot of things to consider when planning to get habits in motion. Opportunity to use or enforce habits is the parameter to be maximized, while opportunities to cut corners and skip steps or states leads to habits dying before they can form.

The best way to enforce this is to add a component to a routine and optimize & simplify the resulting workflow after the fact.

Consider the simplified state machine of my current routine below:

The numbers signify time between tasks as a proxy for the amount of effort I need to put in to accomplish the base set of tasks.

As you can see from the figure, working and sleeping are the biggest blocks of time in which I function; so when adding a new step in my routine, optimizing around one of those is key.

I experienced this tradeoff directly when considering my workout placement — whether it was better to exercise before work or after work? That was where the second component, effort, came into play. When taking weights of actions into account, I was able to rationalize that I’ll want to exercise after work and before I head home. Turns out that a 45 min drive with volatile traffic just gets me in a bad mood, and that wouldn’t help with my consistency anyways.

As a result, I was able to cut down on a large portion of time otherwise spent waiting or in transit with no real value. This not only feels empowering but allows me to pursue more passions and continue to focus on self improvement throughout the day.

It can be inferred from my experience above that a habit can adequately be expressed as an automaton that has been reduced to its simplest form and reinforced through many iterations — and that’s why adding habits is so hard.

As stated above, we struggle with habits and change — especially when introducing new habits into our daily lives. But that’s not just because we’re afraid of the impact, we’re also afraid of failure. We’re afraid that we may not be spending our time as efficiently as we could. And as a result, we lose motivation to our incentives after a couple of weeks.

This is where reinforcement through discipline and usage come into play. With repeated use, be it exercise or learning a new language, we condition ourselves to accept these new activities into our routines faster. And then, after a couple of weeks, our workflows change to accomodate the new activities, and we move on.

Here’s to all of our resolutions and keeping them going strong.

This is just one of the habits I’d been wanting to form, the other being this blog. I’ve started Everyday Math to write about how math can be used to explain or rationalize things in our world we take for granted. Math has always been my passion and I’m excited to share it with you all!