Installing a new habit and breaking an old one - Part 1

By Stephanie Burns

As part of the Goal Achievers' Program I have been teaching students how to install new useful habits and to break existing useless or undesired ones. Having strategies for this type of learning is helpful because some of our goal activities are better suited to being a habit rather than an action that requires active motivation.

In this context students decide what activities they want to become part of their life for a long period or those they will need to do frequently. Who wants to have to motivate themselves each time they need to drink water, take a walk, stretch or write another page of their book? These repetitive long-term activities are less likely to be avoided, forgotten or abandoned if they become habits.

Making an action a habit requires very little understanding of the cognitive activity of motivation, however, that knowledge can add an additional layer of support for habit building.

What is a Habit?

Habits are those things that you do without thinking, like:

• setting the alarm
• cleaning your teeth
• doing the laundry
• feeding the dog

What Should be a Habit?

Those activities that you either want to do for an extended period of time (months or years) or activities you want to do frequently, e.g. one or more times a day even if for only a few weeks.

Why Would We Want Something to be a Habit?

We want these activities to become a habit because if they don't there is a good chance they just won't get done. Either because we forget about them or, once we do remember, we are unable to motivate ourselves to do anything.

It takes energy to remember and moti-vate ourselves to initiate a new action. Habituated actions are far less energy consuming. Think of the benefit if, in addition to having habits for the mundane chores in life, you had habits for getting up a few minutes earlier in the morning, eating a proper breakfast, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, saving a little money every week, paying your bills on time, drinking water throughout the day, staying in touch with friends, exercising, stretching, reading a little everyday, relaxing or writing in a journal. Imagine you actually did these activities without thinking about them, without the to-ing and fro-ing and mucking about in your mind that goes on when trying to decide to initiate an action.

The Core Strategies For Building New Habits

Unless you have observed your own process and behaviour while learning, it is unlikely that you have made explicit the wonderful capability you have for creating new habits.

Many people I meet do not know that this is even an option. What they think about most when the subject of habits is presented is of all the bad habits they have that they want to break!

There are only a few steps to creating a new habit:

• Decide on what you want to be a habit and be as specific as possible. A habit of drinking more water is problematic whereas a habit of drinking six glasses a day is easier to install.
• You have to set up triggers so you will remember the action at the time you want to do it. It is hard to install a new habit if it's not until the end of the day you remember that you meant to take the stairs at work instead of the elevator. During the time before the action is a habit, perhaps the first few weeks, you will need to use external triggers. Make it easy to remember what you are trying to do, use alarms, notes, friends to call you, rubber bands on your wrist, padlocks, obstacles etc. Rituals support remembering - do it in the same place, same time and same surroundings if possible for the first few weeks.
• Once you've remembered you have to be able to motivate yourself to act. Before we discuss how to do that we should discuss the issue of repetition. New behaviours of any type require repetition over time. How much repetition and for how long depends on what it is you are trying to install. One consideration is the size of the action. For simple habits of short duration -getting up earlier, making the children's lunch the night before, doing a load of laundry every morning, saving small change every day, riding your bike to work, writing in a journal etc - you would do the entire action. For activities of longer duration you will need another step.

Let's say you want to go for a walk every morning for one hour. Great habit, but hard to do because of the period of time needed. The first habit you need is to get up and get out the door. The thought of an hour walk can undermine your best efforts to fight the avoidance strategies so short circuit this by installing the habit of getting up in the morning and heading out the door.

Keep the walk short in the beginning, say 10 minutes. Do that every day for a couple of weeks until that habit is firmly installed. Then expand to the hour of walking - that will be the easy part. Also, by doing this you add a wonderful natural motivation component - that of anticipation. We are highly motivated to do things we are denying ourselves. So, if you say 10 minutes a day, don't do 20. You'll end up at the low point and bungle the motivation that comes with anticipation.

This goes for any habit that you are creating that is being built over time, like doing 20 push-ups or 100 sit-ups, or saving money.

Start very small, get the habit of starting under control, then build. This also applies to habits that have multiple actions. Let's say you want to begin preparing food at home, instead of always eating in cafes on the way to work or ordering in for dinner.

This is not just a single faceted action. We have to install habits for checking what's in the fridge, stopping at the shops, getting from the lounge into the kitchen, preparing the food, preparing for cooking, doing the cooking, setting the table and cleaning up.

Any one of these actions could keep you from succeeding in installing this large habit!

Each new action requires motivation and there are a lot of opportunities to quit before dinner is ever made. A second consideration is the number of repetitions. An action you will do every day, or even many times a day, will take only two to three weeks to install. An activity that you will only do once a week but have decided should become a habit for a long time, can take up to 12 weeks to install. For instance, taking the kids to the library every Saturday or having one night a week without television may take awhile. Why? Because it is easier to forget, there is less repetition and it is a larger activity which can more easily engage our natural avoidance strategies. But that is not to say that it is not worth the effort to create these types of habits.

Installing a habit is not energy free. It costs you the commitment to the action for the few weeks it takes. It is a 'whatever it takes' to not miss (of course, if you do miss don't beat yourself up, life is long and there is more than enough time to get it right. You learn from each attempt. Just make the next attempt now, not later.)

Next issue we'll look at some strategies that will help motivate you to continue your new habit.

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Stephanie Burns is one of Australia's top adult educators. Her work has included teaching adults guitar, memory strategies, learning strategies and training trainers to be better communicators. Her latest work is in the area of Goal Achievement. Subscribe to email newsletter by visiting www.stephanieburns.com