id: habits title: Habits previous: deepwork next: llf date: 2021-03-05 ---

## Habits

Habits are both one of the most useful and most destructive things that we do in our lives. The effects of habits compound over time; good habits will produce better and better results while bad habits do more and more damage. The difficulty is that bad habits are often built automatically while good habits take time and effort to set up. This is because of the tradeoff.

Bad habits give us the reward now, the sugar high of the donut, the warm coziness of not getting up, and the mindless comfort of binge watching yet another television show. The cost is deferred to the future. If I keep eating donuts or never leave my couch we all know that the cost will be my health.

For good habits, on the other hand, the cost is immediate. It is not easy to drag myself out of bed in the morning and get started on the day, nor is it easy to take the time to cook and eat healthily. The benefits are in the future. Good habits are like an investment while bad ones are taking on debt.

The good and bad news is that while habits take time to build, once set up they are quite difficult to break. They also don’t require the perfection that most people think they do. Often when I miss something for a day I feel defeated, it makes me feel like “Well I missed it yesterday so why do it today?” but it has been shown (see Atomic Habits for a more in depth explanation) that a single missed day has little effect on how long it takes to build a habit. More than one day however and the cost starts to climb. Make sure that if you are trying to form a new habit you avoid missing two days in a row at all costs. Mistakes happen but don’t let them compound.

In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear outlines the four steps that are involved in a habit forming and how to use those to both make new ones and break down old, unwanted habits.

Habits don’t need to start out large In fact making them as easy as possible really helps when building new ones. You want to minimize that cost you have to pay right now in order to make it more and more likely that you will keep following through.

The four steps are cue, craving, response and reward. All four are needed for repetitive behaviour. The cue is what initially starts your brain on the loop, this is something external like your phone buzzing. The craving is what that internally provokes, that is the desire to know what the buzzing notification is. The response is the action you take like picking up your phone and checking it. Lastly the reward is that little dopamine kick you get when you read the email, text message or whatever it was. That reward links the cue to the action through satisfying the craving. Over time the buzz becomes associated with picking up and checking your phone. You may even start doing it automatically without realizing that the phone is now in your hand.

We can tweak each of these steps to build or break habits. For example: I am trying to build the habit of getting up early. I do it often but it is not a habit yet. There are stretches where I fail, especially lately when I have had other stressors in my life, it has fallen off a little. The habit I am trying to break is my overly close connection to my phone. I check it too much, use it too often and keep it too close at hand.

### The Cue:

Build - Make it obvious: It is hard to get more obvious than an alarm, however I have had the same alarm noise for a while, I have become used to it, so it is probably a good idea to change it. That will make it stand out more and will force me to wake up more to understand what is going on.

Break - Make it invisible: I try not to have too many apps that show notifications on my phone. My habit is bad enough that I just check it periodically, notification or not. This means that I need to keep my phone out of my line of sight and off my person so that I can’t feel it. I can keep it off my desk when I am working and in my bag (as opposed to my pocket) when I am going out.

### The Craving:

Build - Make it attractive: We like to anticipate things, anticipation is often more of a driver then the actual reward itself. In order to make getting up attractive I want to have some sort of reward that I know is waiting for me when I get out of bed. This is not getting the reward but I need to anticipate it to drive me to take action. Now that I think about it I might be structuring my morning incorrectly. Normally I journal, meditate, then go to the gym. The activity I enjoy the most is the exercise. It also has the advantage of waking me up. So I will use exercise as the reward (the gym is best earlier anyway as it is quieter and less likely I will have to wait for a station). The anticipation of the gym is how I am going to make getting up more attractive. Even better would be using the social pressure of meeting a friend at the gym.

Break - Make it unattractive: I am pretty sensitive to wasting time but, not always in the moment. This is the problem and I certainly beat myself up for it later. I need a way to bring it more immediately to my attention. Finding or writing some sort of widget that displays how long I have spent on my phone so far that day is a good one. This could be on my lock screen and home page. Then I will anticipate that number staring me in the face if I do, in fact, pick up the phone.

### The Response:

Build - Make it easy: This may not necessarily make it any easier but it will certainly motivate me a lot more. Having my alarm on the desk instead of beside the bed will make me get up and walk across the room to turn it off. (It may also help with breaking my phone habit). By the time I turn it off I am up, or if I let it go for a few minutes I won’t be able to doze back off.

Break - Make it difficult: Having the phone out of line of sight is good, out of reach is even better. I can also make sure the apps that normally entice me to check it are harder to get to. They should be off the home screen for sure. Buried under folders in my apps menu is better. I could hide them so that I have to actually type in the name to find them, or uninstall them altogether. Some combination of these will work, depending on if the app in question is useful or not. Making it take more time to get to apps will give me more opportunity to realize what I am doing and stop. I may even decide that the time is not worth checking it in the first place.

### The Reward:

Build - Make it satisfying: Getting right to the gym and the endorphin rush that comes from moving is good, moving that to the top of the list is much better. For me exercising is more viscerally satisfying than journalling or meditating. Also I take great satisfaction at having a huge chunk of my daily list done by noon which I can’t do if I don’t get up early. Making sure I give myself the time and space to appreciate that and remember why I am so ahead on the day is important.

Break - Make it unsatisfying: I am going to make this public, which makes it hurt more if I don’t improve. I am going to, at the end of each blog post, list how many hours I have spent on my phone that week. The number is pretty likely to be embarrassing and will only be more so if it gets worse.

There are more tips and tricks in Atomic habits and I will be trying to use all of them. It is worth the read. Now that I have gone over how, there is still the question of why you want to build (or break) habits?

There are a few reasons. The benefits of good habits compound over time while the costs of bad ones also compound. Even if the habit is a very small one the effect over time can be massive. People often overestimate what they can do in the short term but underestimate what they can achieve in the long term.

The example that is used in Atomic Habits is the change of 1% per day for a year. If every day of the year you are 1% better than you were the previous day by the end of the year you are more than 37x better. Obviously there are limits to what we can do but this thought experiment goes to show that small changes compounded over time add up to huge changes. The opposite is also true. If you are 1% worse each day at the end of a year you are 1/33rd of what you were at the beginning of the year. This feeds into the next reason that habits remove decisions: making your life easier.

We are bombarded every day with choices and as the day progresses, the more choices you have to make, the worse decisions you make. This is known as decision fatigue. The point of habits is that they are automatic, it is no longer a choice that adds weight throughout the day. It frees you up to spend that energy on choices that are more important or can’t be turned into habits. Once your habit is properly set up, like going for a run every day, you can reap the benefits without the cost on your willpower it takes to force yourself to go out and run. Breaking bad habits stops you accruing the cost of them over time without your awareness.

Habits provide a foundation upon which to build your life. If you have good habits they will take care of you by making your life easier. They also allow time for just doing the things that are important to you in life. Bad habits are something you have to constantly compensate for. They leave you spending all of your free time just offsetting their cost. So often we think of habits as just happening and not something that we can control. This is not the case. It certainly takes work, but it is possible to change habits and this knowledge leaves me personally with a much greater sense of control over my life.

Managing our habits is something that we can all take advantage of to live better lives with a greater amount of control over what we do and ultimately where we are in life. If you can think of a habit that you want to build or break try writing out how to take the four steps for that particular habit and give it a shot. It may take some work now, but the benefits are for life.

Thanks for reading.

Phone time: I am going to go from last friday to yesterday (thursday) so that I get 7 full days. Across all different applications (some are useful I swear but I bet that most are not) I spent 34 hours and 29 minutes on my phone in the last 7 days. That is almost a full work week. Adding that all together surprised me and this is definitely hard to post.