Habit Forming

I've been thinking about making habits.

Clearly, there are many reasons to make a new good habit or break a bad one. However I can tell even now that my goal to live a more prosperous life is going to require some changes in my habits. A lot of the things that people say they want to do to improve themselves are really just either getting rid of a bad habit or making a new one, or a combination. Some goal like "lose 10 pounds" is really about making habits to exercise and eat better and kill habits of getting takeout and eating candy -- or something.

I've heard that it's commonly accepted in psychology that it takes about 21 days to form a new habit. I don't have any statistics on how long it takes to break an existing habit, but my gut says that it's longer than that. That leads me to two kind of revelations I've recently had about habits.
First, it's probably easier to replace a habit than just kill one. So if you want to stop eating potato chips, instead of just avoiding them, you pull a bait and switch by getting hooked on nuts or carrot sticks instead. So every time you want a chip, you grab a stick. You neatly sidestep that void of completely not having the thing you want. For some things, this can be pretty obvious (note, obvious does not equal easy): Nuts for chips, gum for cigarettes, tea for coffee, and so on.

Some replacements are much more subtle and difficult. Let's say you are in the habit of being self-deprecating and it affects your self-esteem. Well, there are a lot of potential habits that you might need to add to combat this. For example, when you get a compliment, get in the habit of accepting it. Make a habit of not enforcing the self-deprecation of others. Get in the habit of replacing self-deprecating thinking with affirming thinking ("I'm good enough, I'm smart enough..."). Stuff like that.

This let me to a blinding brain flash about the nature of goals. A lot of personal goals are actually these messy, undoable fantasies. And we know that it's easier to accomplish a goal when it's concrete. "I want to get my degree in underwater basketweaving" is easier, in terms of motivation and focus, to accomplish than "I want to, like, embrace learning and always learn new stuff, man." A goal like "I want to be fit and healthy" is hard to accomplish because it's not something you can just do. Not the kind of thing that you can add to a list and check off at the end of the day (Monday: [X] Be fit and healthy). Yet the nebulous mushy goals are often those that connect most deeply to the kind of life we want and the kind of person we want to be.

My flash was that these kinds of goals are often just collections of small habits. And habits are the kinds of things you can put on a checklist and mark off. And, in theory, at the end of three weeks you won't need to put it on a checklist anymore (does your daily todo list have "wake up" or "brush teeth"? probably not). The trick is that some of these habits might not be obvious at first glance. They might seem peripheral to the actual thing you want to do.

Here's an example: Last year my husband and I decided we wanted to eat better. Now we know that "eat better" is exactly one of those nebulous undoable fluff goals that are damned hard to implement. So we found ourselves breaking down the goal into sub goals such as "eat more fresh fruit." Now this is better, but we discovered that there are still a number of habits you have to make before the you can meet the goal.

For example, fresh fruit goes bad, so we needed to get into the habit of "shopping more frequently" and "buying only a little at a time." For habitual food stockpilers this second one was difficult. I kept coming home from the grocery with ALL THIS FRUIT that would then go bad before we could eat it. There are other habits. For example, when you live in a household with more than one person, you have a habit of saving stuff. So if there's a bag of cookies, you don't eat them all... you "save some for the other people." This is a great habit if your goal is "get along with your family." But it doesn't work with fruit! The last of those delicious local tree-ripened plums will go bad because everyone's saving it for someone else. So the new habit is "just eat the fruit!" After all, there'll soon be more because we are "shopping more frequently."

Another issue is that when you aren't in the habit of eating fresh fruit, you don't tend to think about including it in meals. So one habit is "snack on fruit" and a second is "have that with fruit." Hungry? Here's an apple. Breakfast. You want an egg? Have some melon on the side. Another habit that helps with the snacking part is "prep the fruit" -- if you come home with a melon and just set it there, it may never get eaten. Chop that puppy up, put half in a container on the TOP shelf of the fridge and put the other half out on the counter on a plate. Got grapes? Wash them all now and them set them out. They won't have a chance to go bad. On Saturday mornings, I've gotten into the habit (see?) of chopping up any fruit that will soon go bad and putting it out to be eaten that day.

Now let's be clear. We didn't sit down with some kind of family todo list and plan this out. It's not written down any place (except for this journal entry). All of this just developed as we struggled to eat more fruit because we wanted to eat better. It was communicated through regular conversion "would you please buy less fruit?! It's gone bad! Fine, but eat more of it and quit saving it then. OK, but now we're running out -- aren't you going to the store soon?"

But then it hit me that this whole more fruit thing was just about identifying and implementing new habits. The habit you go after isn't just "eat fruit" but all those things that make it easier to eat fruit. Suddenly you find yourself eating lots of fruit and it's no big deal. The little habits are made and the big ones just fall into place.

This is probably DUH-OBVIOUS to a lot of you, but getting this connection viscerally was a big deal to me. Suddenly all those fluff goals ("make new friends!") translate to real doable things. Habits that you can make in just about three weeks of effort. And three weeks isn't a very long time, all things considered.