Change habit? Easily!

You’ve probably heard that it takes 21 days to form or change a habit. According to another version — 60 days or six months. Actually it is not. New research has convinced me that habits can be easily created or changed if you understand the mechanism of their formation and know how to use it in practice.

Most of life consists of automatic actions that we do without thinking, because we repeat them every day. Remember them — these are habits that have wound up as if by themselves, by the way. For example, you put the keys in the same pocket, or every weekday you play the chain of morning rituals in the same sequence. You probably have several dozens of such routine actions:

• How are you going to work in the morning.
• What is the first thing you do when you get to work.
• As you clean the house, choose products in the store.
• How do you train.
• How do you wash your hair.
• How do you water indoor plants?
• As you collect the dog for a walk, feed the cat.
• How do you put your kids to bed at night?

And so on.

How did you manage to work out so many if it’s a difficult process? In fact, in most cases, we wind them up unconsciously and reproduce them automatically. They help to cope with a thousand things that have to be done throughout life. Since you don’t have to think about automatic actions, they free up your thought processes to work on other things. A very useful trick our brains have evolved to make us more efficient.

It all started with saliva

Let us turn to the history of the issue and recall the achievements of the great Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. Pavlov received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1904 «for his work on the physiology of digestion». While studying the processes of digestion in dogs, he found the response of dogs to stimuli that usually accompanied eating — for example, the sound of a bell or the sight of a tray on which the person feeding them usually brought food. These external stimuli led to salivation even in the absence of food itself. In other words, the dog has developed a conditioned reflex to external stimuli.

Everything goes something like this:

First you put two things together: a stimulus (food) and a response (salivation):

A stimulus (food) causes a response (salivation)

Then you add an extra stimulus:

Stimulus 1 (food) + stimulus 2 (bell) elicits a response (salivation)

Over time, you remove the original stimulus, and only the additional stimulus will elicit a response:

Stimulus 2 (bell) leads to response (salivation)

Here you are probably wondering what this has to do with you. The mechanism of formation of conditioned reflexes is the starting point for understanding automatic behavior and habits.

Let’s look at the process of smoking. Where does it all begin?

Stimulus 1 (the sight of a cigarette) elicits a response (light and smoke a cigarette)

Then we add:

Stimulus 1 (seeing a cigarette) + stimulus 2 (feeling bored) elicits a response (light and smoke a cigarette)

And finally we get:

Stimulus 2 (feeling bored) triggers a response (light up and smoke a cigarette)

Now let’s look at what we now know about forming or changing habits.

1. Small, specific actions are more likely to become habitual.

Let’s say you decide to develop a habit of exercise and say to yourself, «I’m going to do more exercise from now on.» This setting is unlikely to become a habit, because the task is set too abstract / vague and too global.

How about «I’ll work out three times a week»? Already a little better, but still not specific enough. “I will walk every day after work” is better because it is more specific. Or even like this: “When I get home from work, the first thing I do is change into comfortable clothes/shoes and walk for 30 minutes.”

2. Simplifying an action increases the likelihood that it will become a habit.

Once you’ve set yourself a goal for a small, specific action, try simplifying the task even further so that it’s easier to complete. Prepare the right shoes and clothes somewhere at the entrance to the apartment so that you can immediately see them when you return home. That way you are more likely to reach your goal.

3. Actions associated with physical movement are easier to make habitual.

Walking is easy, but if you need to create a mental work habit, such as setting aside some time each morning when you arrive at the office, to plan out the most important tasks for the day, you should come up with some kind of physical action associated with it. For example, place a special board and marker next to your workplace that you will use to create a schedule.

4. Habits that are associated with some sound and / or visual signals are easier to form and maintain.

One of the reasons for the addiction to mobile phones and smartphones is precisely that they give signals — flash, buzz or chirp when a message or alert arrives. These cues capture our attention and increase the likelihood that we will develop a conditioned reflex. The best way to change an existing tradition is to create a new one to replace it.

Let’s say that every day, returning home from work, you perform the same ritual: undress, take a soda or beer, turn on the TV and sit on the sofa in front of the screen. You would like to give up this waste of time, because before you have time to look back, how an hour or two passed, and you did not have dinner, did not read and did not do the exercises. How to change a habit? You need to go back to the very beginning of the stimulus / response cycle and replace the current response with some other one.

Here’s how it happens:

Stimulus (coming home) triggers a response (take a soda, turn on the TV, sit on the couch)

To change this chain of actions, decide what you want to replace it with. For example, you want to take a walk as soon as you get home. The best solution is to prepare comfortable shoes and clothes to change in the hallway. Do this for a few days with purpose and awareness, and go for a walk. Within seven days, you will develop a new conditioned reflex:

Stimulus (going home) triggers response (change shoes, change clothes and go for a walk)

Try it. Think of a new habit you’d like to start or an existing one you’d like to change. Then identify the stimulus and response. Make sure the action is small, light, physical, and use an audible or visual cue if possible. Practice it for a week and see what happens. You’ll be surprised how easy it is to create or change addictions.

Source: Psychology Today