Building Healthy Habits: How Habits Work
If you’ve ever tried to change a behavior, you know it can be a struggle. Despite your best intentions, you may still have a hard time following through, staying motivated, or simply remembering to do what you need to do.
It can be even more difficult when building healthy habits. There are so many distractions or old habits holding you back.
There is a way to side-step those challenges and make it easy and automatic to adopt healthy behaviors. Building habits takes some work upfront, but it can make a huge impact on your ability to achieve your goals.
What Is A Habit?
A habit is a behavior that you perform automatically, that you don’t need to actively think about or plan for.
You probably already have plenty of habits: brushing your teeth before bed, showering in the morning before work, or eating popcorn when you go to the movies. Those habits are hard-wired into your brain. If you don’t do them, something feels off.
This article will explain how habits work in your brain and why you should spend some time and effort building healthy habits.
To learn more about habits, here are a few articles for you:
How To Break An Unhealthy Habit
A "Hack" For Building Habits Faster
The Most Important Health And Fitness Habits
6 Tips For Building Sustainable Exercise Habits
Why Habits Are So Important
When it’s time to make a healthy lifestyle choice, like going for a jog or ordering a healthy meal at a restaurant, it’s always a trade-off.
You know that exercise and healthy eating are good for you. You want the benefits of those healthy behaviors such as more energy, less risk of getting sick or dying from a heart attack or a stroke.
Of course, the benefits of healthy behaviors don’t come immediately, they take time.
With healthy behaviors, you have to give up something now (get up off that comfortable couch to go for a jog or say no to that delicious burger) to get a benefit later.
Unfortunately, our brains aren’t wired for long-term benefits. We prefer immediate rewards over later ones. When our brains “weigh” an immediate reward against a long-term one, they give the immediate reward more weight.
To learn more about why change is so hard, check out my full article Here.
We evolved that way because thousands of years ago we were in constant danger of starving or freezing to death. We had to take every opportunity to eat as much high-calorie food and take advantage of as much comfort as we could get.
These days, we have too much opportunity to eat and not move, but our brains are still wired to prefer those things. This is why it can be so difficult to make healthy choices, you literally have to fight against your own brain to make them.
The Two Systems In Your Brain
When you build healthy habits, it makes it much easier to make healthy choices. To understand why, you need to know a little about how your brain works.
There are two systems that control your behavior: Your “Conscious Thought System” and your “Automatic Thought System”.
Conscious Thought System
The Conscious Thought System works whenever you’re aware that you’re thinking about something. It’s responsible for complex thoughts and actions, like problem-solving and planning ahead.
Unfortunately, that system has limited processing capacity. You can only deal with 1 or 2 complicated thoughts or actions at a time. Try solving 13 x 28 while hopping on one foot, and you’ll see how difficult it is to do 2 complex things at once.
Your brain needs to be able to handle millions of signals coming in and out at any given second to keep you alive and functioning, which is why you also have another brain system, the “Automatic Thought System”.
Automatic Thought System
The Automatic Thought System is what your brain uses to process and respond to a lot of information very quickly, without having to consciously think about it. That system is incredibly important, you wouldn’t be able to function at all without it.
It also adapts over time. When you perform a complex action over and over, your Automatic System learns how to do it and eventually takes over, freeing up your Conscious System to work on other things.
Think about your daily drive to work. When you first started driving to your current work location, you probably had to look for street signs, pay attention to each turn, and consciously decide which lane to drive in.
After driving the same route many times, though, you don’t need to pay much attention. Your brain subconsciously “knows” where to make each turn, and you’re able to concentrate on other things. Your actions have been coded into your Automatic System (they are now a habit).
In fact, habits can become so strong that they take over even when you don’t want or expect them to.
Let's say you change jobs. When you get into the car to drive to work one morning while absent-mindedly thinking about something else, you might accidentally take a turn towards your old work location. That's your Automatic System taking control of your behavior.
This is why habits are so powerful, because they tap into your Automatic System. When your Automatic System takes over your behavior, there’s less thinking about it, less planning for it, and less chance of bailing on that behavior.
It feels easy and effortless because it’s not using up the Conscious System’s valuable processing resources. If you can turn healthy behaviors into habits, you won’t have to struggle or fight yourself to exercise or eat healthy, it will become an automatic part of your daily routine.
How To Build Healthy Habits
Habits have 3 components: the cue, the routine, and the reward.
The cue is a trigger that tells your brain to turn on your Automatic System. The cue can be a person, a place, a thing, a time, or an emotion. If you’re trying to build a running habit, the cue could be seeing your running shoes by the front door and putting them on.
The routine is the habit itself. This would be your run.
Finally, there is the reward, which reinforces the routine in your brain. Our brains respond best to immediate, emotional rewards. For your running habit, the reward would be a better mood, a sense of pride and achievement, and any other positive emotions you get from your run.
As you perform this loop over and over again, it becomes more and more automatic. Keep repeating the loop until the cue and reward become intertwined (your brain starts to expect the reward.)
After a while, a powerful craving for that reward emerges. It’s once that craving is present that you have formed a lasting habit.
For me, I feel what I can only describe as a pull to run or lift weights. I crave those positive feelings. When I need a mood boost, the first thing that comes to mind is to do a workout.
It’s not a struggle, because I want to do it. You can build that same mental pull to exercise, and if you do, it’ll be easy to achieve your goals.
How Habits Work
Step-By-Step Guide to Building Healthy Habits
Let’s say you want to start drinking more water. Here’s how you would set up a habit loop for that goal:
Step 1: Choose a cue
A good cue is one that you’re sure will happen at least once, if not several times, a day. It could be getting an email or hanging up the phone. You can also create a new cue, like setting an alarm on your phone or putting a note on your computer or fridge.
Step 2: Choose a reward
Your reward needs to happen immediately. It’s not good enough to reward yourself at the end of the day if you’ve finished your whole water bottle. That’s too far away from the behavior (all the sips of water you took throughout the day).
Your reward also needs to be a positive emotion. That’s the most effective type of reward for wiring habits into your brain. Some of the best rewards are little mental affirmations you say to yourself.
You could think (or say out loud) “Yes!”, “Success!”, or “Woohoo!”. Break into a big grin, throw your arms in the air, do a fist pump, whatever works for you. It seems silly, but it works.
You can also track your progress by checking off a calendar or piece of paper, so you can see your streak. It’s incredibly satisfying to have a streak going and get to check off another success. It also gives you a visual gauge of how you're progressing.
Step 3: Make a plan to follow through
If you get an email but you don’t have any water within easy reach, you won’t get the reward to complete the loop. Make sure you have everything you need to set yourself up for success.
Buy extra water bottles and keep them around the house and the office. Set reminders to bring a bottle with you everywhere you go. Do whatever you need to do to make sure that whenever your cue happens, you’ll be ready.
Step 4: Start repeating your habit
It won’t happen right away, but if you keep repeating your habit and your reward every time your cue happens, your habit will start to get hardwired in your brain. One of the best studies on habit-building found that, on average, it takes about 66 days to build a habit (not 21 days, as you may have heard). Be patient and keep at it. With a little effort now, developing healthy habits will, over time, result in big rewards.
If You Need Help Building Healthy Habits
Here's a FREE resource to help you get started on your journey to building healthy habits:
My Goal-Setting eBook which walks you through the process of setting effecting goals.
If you're getting stuck when trying to build healthy habits, contact me. Sometimes it helps to talk through your ideas and concerns to create a solid footing to developing healthy habits.