Hacking the Habit Loop to Change Bad Habits

The Habit Loop is sort of like a computer program — a very simple one, albeit — consisting of three parts: Cue. According to Duhigg, a cue is “a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use.” For the mice in the MIT experiment, the cue was a “click” sound; for us a cue could be “sitting down at the computer,” or “boredom,” or “lunch time.” Routine. The routine is the activity that you perform almost automatically after you encounter the cue. A routine can be physical, mental, or emotional. Reward. The reward is what helps our “brain figure out if [a] particular loop is worth remembering for the future.” A reward can be anything. For the mice in the MIT experiment the reward was chocolate. For us it could be the feeling we get after eating a Five Guys burger, smoking a cigarette, or watching porn. Hacking the Habit Loop to Change Bad Habits While habits never really disappear, we don’t have to be slaves to them. Research has shown that by becoming aware of the Habit Loop in our lives and making simple tweaks to it, we can change bad habits to good ones. To change a habit, you must simply follow the Golden Rule of Habit Change: Keep the Cue and Reward; Change the Routine. That’s it. “It seems ridiculously simple, but once you’re aware of how your habit works, once you recognize the cues and rewards, you’re halfway to changing it,” said Nathan Azrin, a habit researcher Charles Duhigg interviewed for The Power of Habit. “It seems like it should be more complex. The truth is, the brain can be reprogrammed. You just have to be deliberate about it.” Below is a step-by-step guide that Charles Duhigg suggests using to identify the component parts of the Habit Loop in your life so that you can begin taking deliberate action to change how it runs. Step 1: Identify the Routine The first step is to identify the routine you want to change in your life. Do you want to stop checking your email incessantly? Do you want to stop watching porn every night? How about quitting your caffeine habit? Or maybe you want to quit playing video games all weekend and start working out? This is the part of the Habit Loop that we’ll be tweaking in order to change our undesirable habits. Step 2: Experiment with the Reward “Rewards are powerful because they satisfy cravings. But we’re often not conscious of the cravings that drive our behaviors,” says Duhigg. It’s easy to identity our rewards – pizza, orgasm, drinking – but what are we really craving when we go after those things? And is there a different reward that will satisfy the true craving, but in a more positive way? To answer those questions, you need to conduct a series of experiments designed to test various hypotheses. Don’t get frustrated during this process if it takes too long or doesn’t have the results you had predicted – think of yourself like a scientist who is led by curiosity and dispassionately seeks to uncover the truth. For example, let’s say you have a habit Routine of going to the vending machine to get a Diet Mountain Dew every day. You want to change it because it’s costing you money and Diet Dew isn’t very good for you, so you need to figure out the craving that’s driving you to seek that Reward, and whether a different Reward might satisfy it equally well. To begin your experiments, the next time you feel that all-too-familiar pull towards getting that delicious neon nectar, adjust your Routine so you get a different Reward. On the first day of your experiment, buy a 7-Up instead; on the second day just drink water from the water fountain; on another day simply surf the web or take a walk outside. When you commence the substitute activity (or after say, drinking the 7-Up), set a fifteen-minute alarm on your watch or computer. Then when the fifteen minutes is up, ask yourself: “Do I still feel the urge for Diet Mountain Dew?” Evaluate the state of your craving. If you still feel an urge to do the Dew after surfing the web, then you’ve discovered that your habit isn’t motivated by a craving for distraction. On the other hand, if the craving for Dew disappears after taking a walk outside, then perhaps your Dew habit was being driven by a craving for a quick energy boost. By substituting the soda-Routine for the walk-Routine, you can satisfy your craving for a pick-me-up-Reward, but do it in a healthier, more positive way. Step 3: Identify the Cue Once you identify the reward, it’s time to identify the cue: the thing that triggers the craving. Habit researchers have shown that almost all habit cues fall into one of five categories: Location Time Emotional State Other People Immediately-preceding action Whenever you get the urge for a Mountain Dew, write down answers that correspond to the five possible cue categories. Do this for an entire week. After a while, you should be noticing a reoccurring cue. For example, you might get the craving for a Diet Mountain Dew at a certain time of day or maybe whenever you feel tired and bored. Make note of what you believe your Diet Mountain Dew Habit Cue is. Step 4: Create a Plan After you identify the Cue and Reward, you can start making plans to change your routine. According to researchers, the best way to plan your habit change is through implementation intentions. We wrote about these earlier this year. In a nutshell, an implementation intention is an “if-then” phrase that links a situational cue to a specific action. So let’s use our Diet Mountain Dew example to create an implementation intention to help us kick the habit. Through days of experimenting you discovered that you get the urge to drink a Diet Mountain Dew right around 2PM. You also uncovered by experimenting with different rewards that it wasn’t really the Diet Dew you craved, you were just craving an energy boost. Fortunately, you found that walking outside for 15 minutes gave you the same boost as chugging the sweet stuff. So you could create an implementation intention that looked like this: When I feel tired at 2PM, I will get up and walk around outside for 15 minutes. You’ll need to be methodical about actually implementing your implementation intention. You can’t half-ass it. The goal is to associate taking a walk with your tiredness-energy boost cue/reward combo. Depending on how entrenched your bad habit was, overriding it with your new good habit could take a few weeks. Be patient, stick to your implementation intention, and change will come. Step 5: Believe You Can Change A final ingredient necessary for lasting habit change is to believe that change is possible. Researchers have found that the best way to foster that belief in yourself is to surround yourself with a supportive group of people. According to psychologist Todd Heatherton, “Change occurs among other people. It seems real when we can see it in other people’s eyes.” The ability of groups to encourage belief that change is possible is one of the reasons researchers believe Alcoholics Anonymous has been so successful with helping people beat their alcohol habit. Every week they go to a meeting where everyone believes that they can change. Your group doesn’t have to be as large as an AA meeting. In fact, just having one other person to turn to as you change your habit can foster the belief that you can change your bad habit. Find an accountability partner that you can meet with on a regular basis to report on your progress and get encouragement. Ideally your partner would be somebody that you can meet with face-to-face, but even virtual check-ins can work. How to Form a New Habit Using the Habit Loop Understanding how the Habit Loop works can also help you create new habits that you’ve been meaning to establish, but never had the wherewithal to follow through on. You just need to design a cue-routine-reward loop and work through it until a craving is created that drives the loop. It may take some tinkering and experimentation, but with enough patience and diligence, you’ll strike on something that works