How to make your habits lead you to success.
What do you think is a habit? It is a routine or behavior that is performed regularly and unconsciously.
The quality of our lives are determined by the quality of our habits.
If we know this then why do you think we tend to repeat bad habits?
It’s because behaviors producing a satisfying experience tend to be repeated and those which don’t are discarded.
Whenever you start a good habit you do it for some time and then go back to your old habits so how do you think we can make new habits stick.
We can use four laws of habit formation from the book Atomic habits by James Clear.
It states that there are four stages of habit formation cue, craving, response, reward.
Cue
It refers to the task that you perform before doing a particular habit or an event that triggers a habit.
Suppose you want to start a habit of reading books than your cue can be to place the book in front of you after dinner as our brain is very fast at recognizing pattern it will associate the time after dinner is reading time.
James tells us to make the cues obvious so that you perform the habits that you want to. In above example by keeping the book in front you make it obvious what your next action should be.
The reverse is also true for breaking a bad habit make it invisible so that you don’t perform that habit.
Craving
It is the desire of yours to do a habit or the motivational force behind every habit.
In this stage we try to make the habit attractive we try to find out the benefits of the habits that we are trying to develop.
Consider reading a book we can try to find what are the benefits of reading books and what are the views of people who read books and what we will get to learn by reading books.
We do this to make ourselves be motivated to perform this habit initially.
In James’s words motivation is temporary it comes and goes what we have to focus on is developing a system as motivation can only last till we have accomplished our goals but what after that. We need some reason to continue doing the task that’s where developing a system helps.
Now to break a habit we just have to reverse, make it unattractive. Personally I don’t find myself performing a habits that I know is not very beneficial to me.
Response
A response is the actual behavior or habit performed in response to cue and craving.
Now again if we consider book reading example after dinner as you have placed a book in front of you then the natural response will be to read it.
We should also keep in mind that we have to make habits easy so we will want to perform the habit if it’s too hard then we wouldn’t want to do it.
If we don’t have the book or we are thinking of borrowing it from someone then it a task that our brain associates as hard compared to we already having the book and our chances of performing reading habits in these condition are very low.
Now to break a habit we just have to make it difficult so that we don’t perform it.
Reward
A reward is anything that makes you feel good and motivates you to repeat a behavior.
While watching Instagram our reward is the release of dopamine in our brain due to which it becomes very hard to stop scrolling to next reel.
We are generally animals who behave on the basis of our satisfaction if we feel good by doing a certain task then we will do it again and if not we won’t do it again.
Hence while trying to develop new habits you have to reward yourself for every successful attempt.
At last I would like to thank James Clear for writing such an awesome book which breaks the science of habit formation.
There was much more that I wanted to cover on habits but I will be doing so in some other article.
Lastly do follow me for more such articles and you can share your views regarding this article in the comments.
