Today, we’re talking all about habits—making and breaking various habits. Many people are thinking about New Year’s resolutions, leaving some things behind, and acquiring new behaviors. I’m also going to spell out two specific types of habit formation and habit-breaking programs. I’m going to boil these down to some very explicit steps that anyone can use. I think we can all appreciate the value of habits. Habits organize our behavior into more or less reflexive action, so we don’t have to think too much. Of course, habits can be more elaborate too. We can be in the habit of exercising at a particular time of day, eating certain foods, or saying or not saying certain things. But of course, there are many habits that don’t serve us well or that perhaps even undermine our immediate and long-term health goals, psychological goals, and even our overall life goals.
The 21-Day Habit Formation System
Today, we’re going to talk about making—meaning forming—and breaking—meaning stopping—various habits. I want to spell out a particular system that could be very useful to most, if not all, people for how to build in habits and then test whether or not those habits have really stuck. Basically, what this involves is setting out to perform six new habits per day across the course of 21 days.
Why Six Habits and 21 Days?
The idea is to write down six things you would like to do every day for 21 days. However, the expectation is that you’ll only complete four to five of those each day. Built into this is a kind of permission to fail, but it’s not failure. It turns out that this approach to forming habits is based not so much on the specific habits you’re trying to form but on the habit of performing habits. It’s the habit of doing a certain number of things per day.
For 21 days, you list out four to five things—it might be Zone 2 cardio, resistance training, sunlight viewing, journaling, learning a language, or mathematics. This will vary depending on your particular goals and the habits you’re trying to create. But no more than six, and the expectation is that you’re not going to perform more than four to five. If you miss a day and don’t perform four to five things, there is no punishment. In fact, it’s important that you don’t actually try and do what, in the literature, is called a habit slip compensation, which is just fancy psychological language for when you screw up and don’t get all four or five in one day, you don’t do eight the next day to compensate.
Testing the Habits After 21 Days
After 21 days, you stop engaging in this 21-day deliberate four-to-five-things-per-day type schedule and simply go into autopilot. You ask yourself, how many of those particular habits that I was deliberately trying to learn in the previous 21 days are automatically incorporated into my schedule? How many of them am I naturally doing?
Breaking Bad Habits
Thus far, we’ve almost exclusively been discussing how to form habits. But what about breaking habits? Certainly, many people would like to break habits they feel don’t serve them well. One of the challenges in breaking habits is that many habits occur very, very quickly, so there isn’t an opportunity to intervene until the habit has already been initiated and, in some cases, completed.
How Habits Become Reflexive
If a set of neurons is very electrically active, it’s likely that, over time, those neurons will communicate with themselves more easily because of changes in things like NMDA receptor activity, the recruitment of additional receptors, etc. It’s essentially a cellular and molecular explanation for how something goes from unlearned to learned to reflexive.
Breaking the Cycle
In order to identify a specific protocol one could apply to break habits, how do you take two neurons that underlie a habit out of synchrony? How do you get them to fire asynchronously? This is pretty interesting at the cellular and molecular biology level, but at the behavioral level, it’s especially interesting.
Let’s say, for instance, you have a habit of picking up your phone mid-work session. That’s a reflexive habit I think most people have experienced. We often hear that the phone is so filled with access to dopamine and incredible things that we’re just drawn to it. But if you notice what’s happened with phone use over time, most people—including myself sometimes, I admit—find themselves just looking at their phone or in a particular app without actually engaging in the conscious set of steps of, “Oh, I’m really curious what’s going on in this particular app.” You just sort of find yourself doing it because picking up your phone has become fully reflexive.
The Key to Breaking Habits
It turns out the key is actually to take the period immediately following the bad habit execution—meaning, let’s say you tell yourself you’re not going to pick up your phone, but you find yourself doing it anyway. What has to happen is bringing conscious awareness to the period immediately afterward. In that moment, capture the sequence of events—not that led to the bad habit execution, but rather take advantage of the fact that the neurons responsible for generating that bad habit were active a moment ago and engage in a replacement behavior immediately afterward.
This is really interesting and powerful because you don’t have to identify the state of mind or the sequence of events leading into the bad habit. Rather, the period immediately after the bad habit execution is a unique opportunity to insert an adaptive behavior—any behavior that isn’t in line with the bad behavior.
For example, if you’re trying to do focused work but pick up your phone, rather than just putting it down and trying again, engage in some other positive habit. This links in time the execution of a bad habit to a good behavior, creating a double habit that starts with a bad habit but ends with a good habit. Over time, this weakens the likelihood of the bad habit reoccurring, making it easier to dismantle and replace.
