How Your Habits Are Formed: The Science of the Habit Loop
Your entire day is essentially a series of habits, from getting dressed for work to responding to emails to cooking your go-to dinner recipe. Although these actions may be small, they can have a considerable impact on your health, how much money you save, and even your relationships.
This is why it pays to have more control over your habits, both by encouraging the good ones and replacing the bad ones. Which is easier said than done, because most habits are hardwired. The good news is that it’s a lot easier to change old habits and adopt new ones when you understand how habits are formed in the first place.
What’s more, understanding habit formation can help you model changes to your eating and exercising routines after the habits you already commit to, like brushing your teeth every morning and night.
The Habit Loop: What Every Habit Is Made Of
1. The Cue: What Triggers Your Habit
The cue is the trigger that prompts you to carry out your habit. Most commonly, cues fall into these categories:
- Emotional state (e.g., craving a distraction from your work and getting up to go find a snack)
- Time of day (e.g., looking at the clock and realizing it’s time to get ready for bed)
- Sight (e.g., seeing that your laundry basket is full and ready for washing)
- Location (e.g., walking past your favorite coffee shop and deciding to stop in for a cup)
- Another person (e.g., meeting your best friend and giving them a hug)
The cue is an extremely powerful part of the habit loop because our brain responds to it automatically. It takes a lot of effort to counteract our brain’s response, which is one reason why it’s so hard to change our eating habits. In some ways, convincing yourself to avoid the candy jar at work is equivalent to seeing your best friend and trying not to give them a hug.
Oftentimes, we can be oblivious to the cue. For instance, you may have a habit of snacking on weekdays at 2 pm, but you may not realize it’s being triggered by a less-than-exciting task you work on around that time.
2. The Routine: What You Do
The routine is the action you carry out. It’s the part of the habit that you would want to encourage (e.g., including vegetables in your lunch) or replace (e.g., snacking mindlessly on candy at your desk).
When it comes to bad habits, many experts believe that replacing the “bad” routine with a new, healthier one is more effective than trying not to complete the routine at all, as Duhigg describes in his book.
3. The Reward: What You Get
Though it may not seem obvious, every habit ends in a reward. Even brushing your teeth has a reward: the tingling freshness you feel in your mouth.
If the reward is positive, your brain will remember the habit and want to repeat it. A reward can be anything, but most commonly is a feeling, a milestone (e.g., reaching a certain weight), or something tangible (e.g., earning a bonus at work).
The Craving: What Fuels Your Habits
When a habit is repeated over and over again and consistently delivers a positive reward, the brain develops a craving for it. You can think of cravings as fuel for the habit loop, making the routine become more and more automatic. They’re what makes the habit “stick” in the long term.
For example, many people who successfully lose weight begin to crave the accomplishment they feel after seeing a lower number on the scale or fitting into smaller clothes. This craving for accomplishment helps fuel the various habit loops that contributed to their weight loss, like exercising more or eating more vegetables.
When a habit loop isn’t fueled by a craving, it requires more effort to be completed. If you don’t normally exercise and go to the gym a couple times, you’ll most likely find it difficult to continue the habit, because you haven’t yet experienced a reward worth craving.
You can use the habit loop framework to deconstruct any habit you have, including your eating, exercising, and spending habits. Later this week, we’ll be sharing a step-by-step method for changing habits and crafting new ones that are strong enough to last in the long run.
