Changing Your Habits - Step 4

In my last post I explained how you can identify the cue of your habit in a sea full of information provided to you by your senses. Now that you know the cue and reward of your habit, you can create a routine that is triggered by the cue, and satisfies your craving with the right reward.

Choosing to Change

In the book The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg writes: "A habit is a choice that we deliberately make at some point, and then stop thinking about, but continue doing, often every day" (Duhigg 296). This means that at one point, when you carried out an action, you thought about doing it, you were deliberate and present. Then, as time moved on, and you repeated it over and over again, it became ingrained in your brain, and you started doing it automatically.

To implement a change to a habit, you must begin thinking about that habit again. Duhigg tells us to make a plan, and remember to do it. For example, if you know the cue of your habit occurs at a certain time of day, set a timer for around that time, and when it goes off, go through with your modified habit. It's OK if you fail every once-and-a-while, just keep going with your new habit, and eventually it will stick (Duhigg 297).

Remember to craft a routine that will satisfy your reward. I talked about this in one of my previous blog posts. For example, I figured out that the reward I craved was a break between school and homework. So, instead of eating and watching videos on YouTube, I picked up a book and read for twenty minutes after school.

My new habit, reading

Over the past five posts you have learned how habits work and how to change them. Hopefully you can apply this information to change your habits. What habits have you changed, or would like to change, using what I have taught you? How will you apply what you have learned in doing so?

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Works Cited

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

Changing Your Own Habits - Step 3

In my last post, I began explaining how you can apply what I've learned about in my book, The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg. We learned about how to change a habit, you need to identify the routine, and the reward that it gives you. You then must find an alternative routine to satisfy the craving that the old habit gave you. Now that we've figured that part out, all that remains is finding the cue to the entire habit.

Sensory Overload

Identifying the cue of a habit is hard. Charles Duhigg says this is because we receive so much information from our 5 senses, much of it we don't even realize (Duhigg 294). Take for example Breakfast. Why do you eat breakfast when you do? Is it because you're hungry? Is it because of the time? Do you do it because that's what you do right after you wake up in the morning? Another example is advisory days. Too many times I've gone to third period instead of advisory even though my second period teacher reminded us that it was advisory schedule not five minutes earlier. What is the cue of the habit to walk to third period? You may think that it is the time of day, but it may be more complicated than that. You may do it because you talk to certain people in the hall right when passing period starts. Or maybe you see something on the wall that reminds you to go to third period. With so many stimuli in the world, how could we ever figure out what the cue of a habit is? Charles Duhigg has the answer: "Luckily, science offers some help in this regard. Experiments have shown that almost all habitual cues fit into one of five categories:

• Location
• Time
• Emotional State
• Other People
• Immediately preceding action

" (Duhigg 295). Therefore, you can take notes when the urge to complete a habit first hits.

• Where are you?
• What time is it?
• What's your emotional state?
• Who else is around?
• What action preceded (came before) the urge?

After a few days of logging your habits, you should see one question often has a common answer. For example, in my scenario, where I always eat a snack and watch YouTube when I get home from school, it would be "What action preceded the urge?" because the answer is almost always, "I walked home from school."

My notes from experimenting with my habits

Hopefully this has helped you find the cue of your bad habit. In my next blog post, I will explain how to change the routine of your habit so that you can most effectively change it. Meanwhile, think about a habit you have and what some of it's possible cues are. Try taking notes on what happens when you feel the need to complete your habit. What turned out to be the actual cue?

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Works Cited

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

Changing Your Own Habits - Steps 1 and 2

So you've learned about habits, and how they work, and all you want now is to know how to change them? You want to know how to change all of your habits in one fell swoop.

Let me break it to you. You can't. Every habit is different, there is not cookie cutter 'Chage-My-Life-O-Rama' method that you can apply to every single habit to change the way you act. As Charles Duhigg puts it in his book, The Power of Habit, "It's not that the formulas don't exist. The problem is that there isn't one formula for changing habits. There are thousands. Individuals and habits are all different, and so the specifics of diagnosing and changing the patterns in our lives differ from person to person and behavior to behavior" (Duhigg 287). There is however, a general framework to reshaping habits. 

Step 1 - Identify the Routine

An average day after school

Remember the habit loop we learned about in my first blog post? The first step to changing a habit is to identify the middle step of that loop, the action. Say you have a habit of getting a snack and goofing off after school. Start by finding the routine, because it's the most obvious. In my case, it's eating food while browsing YouTube. After this, it gets harder. What is the cue? Is it hunger? Boredom? The need for a break? What about the reward? The food? A distraction? The entertainment from the videos being watched?

Step 2 - Find the Right Reward

Habits are so hard to change because of cravings. As a habit is developed, a craving is developed along with it. According to Duhigg, during a habit our brain begins to expect a reward and feel rewarded -even before the actual reward is presented. If these cravings aren't satisfied, then we become dejected and unhappy (Duhigg 48). This is why it is important to experiment with the reward, to find the right craving to satisfy. Changing the habit of eating food and watching YouTube after school wont work if your trying to satisfy a hunger craving instead of an entertainment craving.

To figure out what the reward is of your habit, experiment. Don't try to positively improve your habit at first. Just try alternatives. In my scenario, I might try reading the newspaper after school, or I might eat a snack, but get to work on homework right away. Fifteen minutes (set a timer) after trying your alternative routine, ask yourself, "do I still want that after-school snack?" If you feel that you are able to continue your day, and not go back to that habit, then you have found what craving you need to satisfy. On the other hand, if you feel the need to return to your habit, then you haven't fulfilled the craving that comes from your habit.

In my next blog post I will build off of these Ideas here to continue changing a habit. In the mean time, Think of  a habit that you want to change. What is it's routine? What are some of the possible rewards you are getting from this habit. What are some alternative actions you could do to achieve the same reward?

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Works Cited

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

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. 

You Have More Habits Than You Think

"What was I supposed to do again?"
Have you ever walked into a
room, wondered, "why am I
here?" then realize that you
meant to do something in a
completely different room?
Or have you ever gone to look
something up on your phone,
but instead of googling it, you
absentmindedly open your
favorite social media app
and catch up on what's
happening in the world?

This is because both of these actions are habits. A habit is a set of actions that have


been repeated often and have become regular. You've turned on your phone and gone
straight to checking instagram so many times that the one time you want to google
something instead, you automatically and accidentally check instagram.

Your brain has good reason to create habits. It reduces the amount of work the brain
has to do on a regular basis. According to my book The Power of Habit, "Without habit
loops, our brains would shut down, overwhelmed by the minutiae of daily life. People
whose basal ganglia, [the area of the brain responsible for the creation and activation
of habits,] are damaged by injury or disease often become mentally paralyzed. They
have trouble performing basic activities, such as opening a door or deciding what to
eat" (Duhigg 21). This shows that habits control many parts of our life, taking over 
whenever we do something regularly. They can even simplify seemingly complex tasks.
For example, the author of Habit highlights a man who suffered damage to the part of
his brain that stored short term memories. While this man, Eugene, couldn't remember
the day of the week, or the names of his doctors, could take a walk around the block
near his house, because it had become a habit to him (Duhigg).






How do Habits work?
A diagram demonstrating the inner
workings of a habit in The Power of Habit
  A habit has three main components,
  the cue, the routine, and the 
  reward. The cue prompts the brain
  to begin the actions of the habit.
  For example, say you have a habit
  of eating candy. In this habit, the
  cue is seeing the bowl of candy
  sitting on the counter. The routine
  is the set of actions that take place
  to complete the habit. In this
example, grabbing a piece of candy, ripping open the wrapper, and taking a bite.
Yum! This is the reward, the sweet taste in your mouth from  eating the candy.




How does this relate to me?
Using this information, I hope to be able to better identify habits in my daily life. This
will allow me to be more mindful of my actions and identify bad or unwanted habits.
In the future, I hope to modify or eliminate these habits.



Question to ponder

What habits can you think of in your life? Do you think they are beneficial,
or would you want to change them if you could?







Works Cited

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