Old Habits Never Die

So, you've just identified all of your bad habits, and now you want to get rid of them. How do you do that, you may ask? The answer, much to my (and probably your) disappointment, is that you can't. Instead, you change your habits.

The Golden Rule of Habit Change

To change a habit, you need to keep two things the same, the cue, and the reward. According to The Power of Habit: "If you use the same cue, and provide the same reward, you can shift the routine and change the habit. Almost any behavior can be transformed if the cue and reward stay the same" (Duhigg 62).

Chronic Nail Biting

In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg shows this golden rule at work in a story about a woman who always bit her nails. She sought help with someone studying the effects of habits. The expert told her to carry around a notecard and put an X on it every time she felt the urge to bite her nails. At first it was hard for her to remember, but in just a week, it was easy. This exercise helped her identify the cue and reward of her habit. Now that she was aware of her habit, she could consciously do something else to combat it. Her counselor told her that whenever she felt the urge to bite her nails, she should instead seek some other source of physical stimulation, such as rapping her fingers on the table, rubbing her arm, or grabbing her pencil. After about a month of conscious work, this became her new habit, and she no longer bit her nails (Duhigg 74).

YouTube Autoplay

I decided to take Charles Duhigg's advice, and try and fix a habit of my own. I watch a lot of YouTube. When I get home from school, I'll hop on my computer, choose an interesting video, then surf YouTube until I truly need to do homework. To change the habit itself, I needed to identify the cue and reward of it.

Cue: Getting home from school.

Routine: Watch YouTube video after YouTube video.

Reward: The happiness of relaxing and enjoying a video.

Once I did that, I changed the inner routine to my liking. In this case, I just wanted to watch less YouTube, so I changed the inner habit so that I just watch one or two videos. To do this, I used a tool to remove certain elements of the YouTube webpage, to make it much harder to continue surfing for more pointless cat videos. Additionally, I changed my shortcut to YouTube so that I see content I am interested in easier.

My YouTube homepage before (left) and after (right) the changes. (Click to enlarge)

A YouTube video before (left) and after (right) the changes. (Click to enlarge)

As you can see, I made YouTube more focused, so that I could view the few videos that I really wanted to watch, and not the ones that YouTube suggested that I should watch. The videos that it suggests are selected to keep me on the site as long as possible, but I only want to stay there as long as I am interested in what I am watching, so I removed them.

I have had these changes for about a week now, and they have definitely changed how I watch YouTube. I watch for shorter amounts of time, because I run out of content quickly, and move on to something else.

What is a habit that you would like to change, and what is it's cue, routine, and reward? How would you like to change the routine of this habit?

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Works Cited

Duhigg, Charles. The Power of Habit. New York, Random House, 2014.