When looking at behavioral change, one route that has gained traction is the formation of habits. A habit at its core is simple; it is the grouping of a cue, routine and reward. You feel a film on your teeth (cue), you then feel the need to brush your teeth (routine), then your mouth feels minty fresh (reward). This then leads to the question of how we manipulate habits. The idea is simple, replace bad habits with good habits. It has carved out its own space of personal development with more and more books and research on the study of habits. The whole point of a habit is that it becomes somewhat automatic. A recent study found that it takes on average 66 days for a person to form a habit. The range was 18 to 254 days which is far more illuminating than taking the average. Spend 66 days doing a good behavior then it becomes a habit and doesn’t take much effort to get you to do it moving forward. Sounds very powerful right? So then why is it so ineffective. According to the research, everyone who implements this should be making giant strides in their life. If the research was right, habit formation should have been a breakthrough that materially changed how we do things.
Kind Environments
Habits are easier to keep in kind environments. Kind environments are environments that respond well to our actions and are stable in what we can expect from it. This is compared to complex environments that are highly unstable that requires our actions to change as the environment does. Most of us live in complex environments and is one reason habits are so hard to form and keep. The need to adapt the habit to the environment is very taxing and lowers the chance that it can actually become a habit. To do the same thing every day, to a degree requires every day to be similar.
When we focus on habits in a complex environment, we feel like we are failing as we try to stay the same in a changing environment. The fact that the habits we want to have are more complicated, makes the formation of them even more difficult. This is then made more difficult when others in kinder environments are seen as having stronger will power as they are able to better form habits. When we act like habits are the same for everyone, we end up helping a very small group of people.
Resiliency & Gravity
When you finally find yourself in a good habit, you feel on top of the world. It feels like you’re in rhythm and productive. The issue is when you inevitably have an unpredictable week where you feel like nothing is going as planned. This is when good habits fail us and when you see bad habits reappear. This is because good habits suffer from gravity and bad habits have far stronger rewards.
The default actions we seek to take are the laziest. How do we get what we want for the least amount of effort. It is what has gotten humanity to this point. This also makes good habits very hard to maintain as you are always pulled to do less. Bad habits usually have stronger rewards as thats why we adopt them so willingly and find them hard to break from. It’s much harder to form a good habit than a bad habit. This is why the resilience for each is so unbalanced. Good habits will constantly get pulled down by gravity that you have to fight to keep.
Artificial Rewards
Tricking the brain is no easy task, especially if it is your own. To purposely form a habit you must seek a cue to trigger the routine then find a way to reward doing it. This is problematic because the brain knows that it’s an artificial barrier. It forces you to actively resist the temptation to ignore it and just get the reward. When the routine itself is the only way the reward is payed out, it is no longer an artificial reward. The issue is most good habits don’t pay off until well into the future, so you can’t use the result of the routine as a reward. This is what makes it so difficult to form the good habits we want.
Focusing On Habits
This all makes it problematic when we focus on forming habits. We let our guard down over time believing that the habit will continue without work. It creates an obsession in having a streak of consecutive days where you do the habit. Which leads to disappointment when you finally break the streak; that has its own effects on your behavior. It fails to recognize the issues we have when trying to form new behaviors that last over time. Instilling good habits that last over time hasn’t showed to work, yet we keep thinking we need to simply tweak the formula. To actually create long term behavioral change we must look somewhere else.
