How To Form A Habit? Why Is It The First Step Before Everything Else?

You’ve just finished reading a fantastic article on the benefits of running every day. You are all motivated and excited to put on those lovely ADIDAS sneakers and hit the road.

It’s been a week of running every single day when life’s other responsibilities slowly start engulfing all your free time and gradually you begin to lose the initial motivation you had two weeks ago. Every day becomes every other day, which becomes only on the weekends. Before you realize it, you will have given up on the habit of running.

I’ve been there and I am sure you’ve been there too. Why is it so hard to form and maintain a habit despite knowing all its benefits for good health and well-being?

There are so many good writers here who write excellent pieces on living a healthy lifestyle, well-being, different types of diets to lose weight, workouts to get ripped, getting up at 5 am every day and its benefits, and so on and so forth. I often wonder about the psychology of the readers.

I know there are options to bookmark your favorite articles to get back to them later when you have free time. But still, we are so very tied up with so many chores these days that I have my doubts as to how many readers are actually able to implement what they read with the minuscule free time that they have on their hands.

All these articles are based on only one aspect. The aspect of sticking to something and doing it properly and repeatedly until it becomes automated. In other words, it’s forming a habit.

Psychology of Habit Formation and General Practice

In the article “Making health habitual: the psychology of habit-formation and general practice”,the research team talks about the psychological reasons as to why it is difficult to form a habit and gives an effective technique to initiate and stick to a habit. I’ll break it down as easily as I can.

A new habit is nothing but a long-term behavioral change, and traditional behavior change strategies are time-consuming to understand and difficult to implement.

The traditional behavior change strategies are nothing but simply giving advice by writing or talking about the changes to be implemented. For instance, to reduce the risk of a heart attack, you have to walk every day and eat less saturated fat.

When new habits are initiated this way, the gains are usually transient because only a few of the traditional behavior change strategies have built-in mechanisms for maintenance in our brains.

The effects are typically short-lived because motivation and attention wane. Advice for creating habits must be easy to implement and automate. Here’s how you can do this.

Repeat a chosen behaviour in the same context, until it becomes automatic and effortless.

In scientific terms, the above could be written as externally-triggered automatic responses to frequently encountered contexts.

Psychologically, ‘habits’ are defined as actions that are triggered automatically in response to contextual cues that have been associated with their performance.

Automatically washing hands (action) after using the toilet (contextual cue)

Putting on a seatbelt (action) after getting into the car (contextual cue)

Years of psychological research show that consistently repeating a simple action in a consistent context leads to the action being activated upon subsequent exposure to those contextual cues, habitually.

Once initiation of the action is coupled with environmental cues (signals), dependence on conscious effort or motivational processes is reduced. Therefore, habits are likely to persist even after conscious motivation or interest disappears.

We develop bad habits much in the same way. Smoking after a meal or soon after getting up in the morning or with coffee or tea. The action of smoking is repeated every time following an external signal for a long time until it becomes a habit, thus becoming second nature and effortless.

Steps to make a new healthy habit

• Decide on a goal that you would like to achieve for your health or well-being.
• Choose a simple action that will get you towards your goal which you can do on a daily basis.
• Plan when and where you will do your chosen action. Be consistent: choose a time and place that you encounter every day of the week.
• Every time you encounter that time and place, do the action.
• It will get easier with time, and within 10 weeks, you should find you are doing it automatically without even having to think about it.
• Congratulations, you’ve made a healthy habit!

My goal: to jog every other day.

My plan: after getting back from work or before dinner.

Where: A park near where I live.

When: Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.

Some people find it beneficial to keep a record while developing a new habit. A daily tick-sheet can be used to track your progress until your new habit becomes automatic. You can score how automatic it feels at the end of each week to see how it improves.

The cue to perform the action must be very straightforward and something that’s repeated every day.

If the action is repeated consistently for 66 days in the chosen context, even missing it for a day or two will not impact the process negatively. By this time, your new habit will have wormed its way into your brain and become something of second nature. You will find it hard to break this new habit even if you tried.

Aim for small and manageable behavior changes, because failure can be discouraging.

Start with small changes and scale them up slowly and steadily. For instance, 20 push-ups after morning coffee should be your first step. The action will start becoming easier gradually. Midway through the process, you can increase it to 30 push-ups for a few more days.

But doing it every day in the same context (after morning coffee) is something that can't be compromised. You can then keep going forward for 10 weeks without breaks.

The most important thing of all is to choose a single specific action to be formed into a habit. Multi-tasking is your nemesis here. Combining more than one action may stave off boredom, but is very effortful and depends on maintaining motivation, and is incompatible with the development of automaticity.

Stages of habit formation

Initiation phase: During which the new behavior and the context in which it will be done are selected.

Learning phase: Automaticity develops in the subsequent learning phase, during which the behavior is repeated in the chosen context to strengthen the context-behavior association.

Stability phase: Habit-formation culminates at this stage, at which the habit has formed and its strength has plateaued so that it persists over time with minimal effort or deliberation.

It is much more beneficial to choose a new behavior (for example, eat an apple) than to give up an existing habit (for example, do not eat fried snacks) because it is impossible to create a habit of not doing something. Because of the automaticity of habit, changing existing habits requires different and far more effortful tactics than forming new habits.

Unfortunately, there are no quicker or easier shortcuts to creating a real habit. Consistent work is needed time and time again.

Good luck with implementing what you read :)

Thank you for reading.