How to undo old habits and build new ones
“Make the impossible
possible, the possible easy,
the easy elegant”
~ Moshe Feldenkreis
When it comes to health, your genes are not your destiny. Up to 85% of chronic disease can be attributed to lifestyle factors, not genetics, and implementing just a few healthy behaviours can add years to your life. (1)
Everyone wants to live a long, happy, disease free life. So, if it’s just a matter of making healthier choices each day, why are we in the middle of a chronic disease epidemic? The problem is that many of our health choices are based on age old habits that are engrained. Changing the way we eat, how we exercise, our sleep routine, our mental health, requires us to adjust habits that we have built over a long time.
Information isn’t really enough to change behaviour. That is because much of our behaviour is based on habits and not decision-making. Willing a change to happen won’t cut it either – we need to connect to a motivation.
What is a Habit?
All behaviour is driven by the desire to solve a problem. The purpose of every habit is to solve the problems you face. Habits are mental shortcuts learned from experience. A habit is any action that you do automatically and without thinking, in response to certain cues in your environment, like making a cup of tea or brushing your teeth. You perform such habitual actions throughout the course of your day, without needing any extra motivation or mental energy to do so. You can easily go through a complex series of actions while your mind is autopilot.
On the whole, habits make our lives easier. The conscious mind is the bottle-neck of the brain; being able to get things done on autopilot frees up our mind for more important things. However, it is just as easy to create negative habits as positive ones, and if you have ever tried to kick such habits into touch, you will know that breaking long-held habits is a challenge.
Breaking Bad Habits
Once you have worked out what habit you want to break, you need to identify the cue and the reward. The cue is the thing that triggers you to perform the habit. It can be something very mundane like getting home from work, or the clock striking 6pm. Or it could be triggered by being with a particular person (I have one friend with whom I always smoke). Or when you feel a particular way, like feeling stressed. Be as specific as possible – note where you are physically, your emotional state, and what you do immediately before this unwanted habit. Changing behaviours always starts with a high level of awareness.
The reward is what positively reinforces this routine and sets the habit into your brain. It can be a taste, or a feeling, or a sense of relief (eg from stress). It must be something that you find pleasurable and that motivates you to continue your habit. If you aren’t sure what your reward is, wait until you next engage in that habit. What craving set your routine in motion?
Through repetition, the cue becomes associated with the reward in our minds. Once this pattern becomes fixed in our brain as a routine, you no longer need to feel motivated to take the action. You won’t even be fully aware of everything you are doing: when you encounter the cue, the habit takes over.
Now design your new habit. Make your plan for this new habit specific. People who make a specific plan are more likely to follow through. We tend to say “I am going to eat more healthily” but we don’t say when and how this is going to happen. We leave it up to chance and hope that we will just remember to do it and find the motivation at the right time. When your plans are vague it’s easy to rationalize little exceptions and not get around to the things you need to do to succeed. Being specific will also help you say ‘no’ to things that could derail progress, distract your attention and pull you off course.
Write down your new habit. Broadly speaking, the format should be “When Situation X happens, I will do Response Y”. Remember to incorporate as many details as possible in both the Situation and the Response.
Give your new habit a time and a space. The goal is to make the time and location so obvious that with enough repetition you do the right thing at the right time even if you can’t say why. Maybe attach it to another habit that you already do rather than linking it at a particular time or location.
Here are 8 tips to help you make lasting changes
Choose the habit to change yourself – it’s no good if someone chooses it for you, however well-meaning. You won’t feel the motivation to stick with it.
When designing a new behaviour, make it specific, measurable and achievable – so put detail into your goal. Don’t just say ‘eat healthily’, but rather ‘incorporate 4 portions of vegetables into my diet every day’, or ‘cut out sugar and refined flour on weekdays’.
Make it smaller – so shrink the change. Cut it into bite size pieces and make those pieces easily achievable. For example “eat one cup of vegetables for lunch”, or “drop the biscuit snack at 11am”.
Stick it on to an existing habit. This is called habit-stacking and is extremely helpful in making sure that such a habit doesn’t get squeezed out. For instance, one man I know who couldn’t do even one press-up, started to do press-ups every time he waited for the kettle to boil for his tea or coffee. He can now do 30!
Organise your environment to assist you and keep temptation out of the way. So, if it’s a question of going for a run or walk before work in the morning, put out your kit the night before; or if you want to take certain foods out of your diet, clean out your larder so that there is nothing in it that could tempt you.
Put it in your diary – make it a fixture if you can. Give it as much weight as your other commitments. Remove the risk of not finding time to do it.
Find a way of marking your success streak – stick a chart on the wall or find an app, and mark off every day that you have successfully executed your new habit.
Put a strategy in place to help you deal with those lapses in motivation. Try and anticipate what could trip you up and have a plan for those circumstances. Identify your most vulnerable moment. Usually once you have your boots, coat and hat on, it isn’t so hard to go for a walk in the rain, so give that moment maximum concentration.
Health Coaching
Trying to make difficult changes alone can be challenging. However, having the support of someone who understands behaviour change and can empathise with the difficulty of getting rid of old habits, can make it a lot more manageable. We will work with you to discover why you want (and don’t want) to make a change, explore your ambivalence and identify your blind spots that are preventing change from happening. As a health coach, I don’t teach my clients or give them ‘the answer’. Instead, I help them learn how to build habits and set goals. That distinction goes to the heart of what health coaching is about.