How Habitual is Your Habit?

Did you realize that MOST of what we do in a day, in a week, throughout the year are our established habit actions? We do have some variety in our lives, but even when an event comes up that we attend, or we go on a date, or see family, our behavior is largely based on our habitual behavior in those situations. When we begin a new habit, when is it actually considered to be a habit? We are going to dive into this deeply this week to look at the stages that we have to go through to be able to do something on auto-pilot and what other characteristics that we can look for to know that we have gotten past the drama of it. 

Transcript

Hello everyone. How is your week going? When I ask that, I bet you probably go to the events of the week. Whether or not anyone is sick. Whether or not there is a change in routine or it’s a regular week with nothing much different. But how are you feeling this week? Sometimes that is not related to the events that are going on, but to just how your mindset is this week. Whether or not you have been sleeping. How you are feeling in your own body. How you have interpreted what is going on around you. When people make comments to you, are you seeing them with good intentions and positive feelings? Or are you seeing other people’s snippiness and interpreting what they do and say in negative ways? We tend to look for the positive or negative around us, based on how we are feeling. 

There was a story that I heard about a study that was done about this by Dr. Richard Wiseman. They asked the participants whether or not they felt lucky or unlucky. And then gave them a newspaper and asked them to count the number of pictures in it. There were 2 different, giant, half-page ads placed in the newspaper- the first one said “Stop Counting there are 42 pictures” and the 2nd one said “Tell the experimenter you’ve seen this ad and collect your $”. 

The interesting outcome of this experiment is that almost exclusively, the people who considered themselves lucky saw at least one of those ads and stopped the experiment. And the people who considered themselves unlucky did not see the ads and made a mistake in getting the correct number of pictures. They also felt stressed and pressured during the experiment itself. 

The reason that I tell you this story is because I want you to remember this example when you reflect on whether or not you are having a ‘good week’. Because very often a good week doesn’t happen because of positive things just happening to us. But it happens because we INTERPRET what is happening around us as positive. We are seeing the things in our life that we can be happy about and grateful for. But if we are like those participants who consider themselves unlucky, there just might be many things around us that we ‘miss’. Because our brain is telling us that we are having a not-so-good week. 

This week, I want to talk to you about a very specific part of habit building. And this is to question the accuracy generally-accepted philosophy that it takes 21-days to build a new habit. I have also recently heard that it takes 3-days to break a bad habit when you replace it with a new action. 

Now, I am not outright saying that this is not true. When you begin a new habit, it IS true that the more that you do it regularly without skipping the new event, so if it is walking daily- then without skipping a day, that you are very likely to keep it up regularly at the 21-day mark. So, it is happening regularly. 

What I am asking you this week is to think about whether or not it is done habitually by then. I am going to claim to you that I think that this is going to be subjective. And I will explain to you what I mean by that. First of all, I was just reading some research about habits and there is evidence that it differs very much depending on what the habit is. If your new action is to drink a glass of water when you wake up, then by 21 days that habit can be established. But when it comes to something that we are more resistant to, such as exercise that is more challenging for us, that we are not used to, it may take longer than 3 months to establish this as a habit, some researchers even saying up to a year. 

But there is another part of this. There are stages in habit-forming. And which exact stage do we consider that an action is a habit? This is the part that I consider somewhat subjective. Let’s take the habit of going for a 30 minute walk every day. You might consider it a habit when you go willingly and don’t come up with an excuse not to walk, even though you aren’t enjoying it. But you are doing it regularly. I might consider it a habit when I wouldn’t even consider skipping it. I really want to go for a walk. And then, someone else might consider it a habit only once they go out for a walk without even thinking about doing it, or feeling any emotions toward it at all. They just get ready and go without that little part happening in their mind where they TELL themselves that they need to go for a walk. Kind of like the way that you put toothpaste on your toothbrush before you brush, or turn off the car when you get home or take off your clothes before you get in the shower. You don’t usually have to ‘remind yourself’ to do these things- you just do them. 

So, who is right? You could read all different researchers’ opinions on this, but the truth is that these are all valid stages in forming a brand-new habit. It’s just really a matter of opinion about which stage deserves to be recognized that the habit is ‘formed’. Which one deserves the title of the action now being officially called a habit. It’s subjective. 

Now one thing that you won’t find in this podcast this week is the true answer. Reason being- I am not the ultimate expert and the one to decide when it comes to habits. That would really just be my opinion. What we are going to do in this podcast is to put this question out there to think about and I want you to consider some of that attributes to a habit that come only really after something is so ingrained in you that you won’t ever give it up, without a conscious decision to change the way that you do this. Just like you wouldn’t ever stop putting toothpaste on your toothbrush unless you decided to use some new-fangled way to brush your teeth in a different way, such as a powder or liquid that you dip your brush into or some other new system. 

One of the qualities of a habit that is this far along is the available thinking space during your new routine. When you have an established habit, it usually can be done without requiring a lot of brain power to do it. Once you have been driving a while, you are really only focused on your driving as things out of the ordinary happen that grab your attention. While your driving seems regular and normal, your mind is probably elsewhere thinking about other things. You can see this in most of your regular established habits. 

Now some new habits will get to this stage more quickly than others. Going for a walk doesn’t require a huge amount of focus, while learning how to fly an airplane or learn a new musical instrument or language will require your attention. Eventually you will be able to do the actions without your full focus, but it takes longer when something feels new and challenging. But it is a stage in habit establishment that you can eventually do the thing without the concentrated heavy focus and be able to do it on auto-pilot. 

Another quality is the emotion piece of this. When you are ‘forcing yourself’ to do something new- and you would be forcing yourself because you DO want to do this thing in the long-term, but in that moment when it’s time to do it, you either have a lot of resistance to doing it or you just plain don’t feel like changing whatever it is you are doing currently to go do that other thing. You don’t want to get up off of the couch to exercise. Or you don’t want to get out of bed to go write in your journal and meditate. Once you reach a higher level of this being a habit, not only do you go do the thing without a lot of resistance, but you do it without emotion. 

Taking off your clothing before you get in the shower doesn’t evoke any emotions or feelings- you just do it. And I don’t mean being cold if your room temperature is cool- that’s a physical sensation, but I mean an emotion. When you pull in your driveway, you don’t usually have feelings about turning the key or pushing the button to turn off your car. It’s just an emotionless action. You don’t think about it, you don’t usually stop your other thoughts that you are having, you don’t have to tell yourself to do it, and you don’t FEEL anything about it. Those are the qualities of the final stage of habit-forming. You can truly do the habit on auto-pilot and at the same time free up your pre-frontal cortex for something else.

Now, when you call your new action a ‘habit’ is really up to you. I think that you should decide based on what is most helpful for you. If it motivates you to do something 3 days in a row and to call it your new habit, then go for it! I know that when my wife and I decided to get ready for bed every night at 9:00 no matter what, after 3 nights I realized that it felt established. I still had to tell myself some nights- no, don’t be tempted to stay up- just go to bed, but it was happening every single night without taking a break from it. So, to me, it felt like a habit. 

When it comes to exercise, I know that I have talked with you before about having a lot of resistance to it. It feels hard for me to establish a 15-minute walking routine because my brain continues to tell myself that I ‘know’ that I should really be walking for 45 minutes or an hour, not 15 minutes. I still resist it and I don’t make up my mind to get started. So, I can picture that when I am walking and doing it, I probably won’t call this a real habit until I just get ready and go much more automatically, without all of the drama of telling myself to get out that door and just walk already. I won’t consider it habitual until it is emotionless and automatically happening every day. 

Some of the things that you can think about starting and making automatic are things that I am sure that you have thought of: such as eating vegetables every day, stretching or journaling, starting a regular date night, or spending more time with your friends or your parent or your kids. And I would love it if you would also consider other things that can become habits in your life that you might not have thought of. I will give you a few different categories. 

The first one is the habit of taking a baby-step towards a big dream that you have. I am talking about something that you have not sat down and turned into a goal that you have decided that you will reach this year. I am thinking of the other dreams that you have that you think might or might not happen in your lifetime. Things like taking a trip to Greece or writing a book or hosting a retreat for your friends. You might see those dreams as something that just might happen in the long-away future. But, they just might be things that if you figured out what the very first step was, and began and then figured out the next step, they just might be goals that you will be on your way to accomplishing. 

The second type of habit to consider is a mindset habit. We always think about new actions that we want to take. But what about a habit of coming home from work and upgrading our mood when we see our family. Or the habit of being kind and curious when we see that person that we have a habit of dreading being around. Or a habit of feeling calm when we are around certain people that make us feel anxious. Yes, we have to figure out what actions to take, to put ourself in this desired mindset, instead of our habitual mindset in these situations. We might take some deep breaths, remind ourselves of our new habit- meaning the new feeling that we want, say the thought that would evoke that desired feeling. But eventually, just as in action-habits, this mindset will become automatic. 

Whatever type of plans that you want to make for yourself, whether your habits that you are working on are old familiar ones that you have been trying to establish for forever-and-a-day, or whether they are new ideas that you want to begin this year, or something that just came to you as your were listening to this podcast- such as “French- I always wanted to learn how to speak French and I am going to add that to my list this year and start small today” or whether or not a new mindset or learning to feel a certain feeling in a stressful situation sounds good to you- no matter what type of habit that you are thinking about working on, I want you to keep in mind the natural stages that you will go through in learning it. 

You have to get through many other stages before you get to that automatic, emotionless stage. It’s ok if stage one is to plan exactly when you will do this new thing for the first time, prep it by getting everything ready ahead of time, figure out what the big reward will be for afterward so you can bribe yourself into doing it, and then still force yourself when it’s time and not be surprised that, of course, you still don’t want to do it. That’s what stage one is often like. 

You can still talk kindly to yourself through it. It is not a reflection on your character that it feels hard to start something new that is a change! Just remember all of the things that you have in your life right now that were previously just an idea of something new. At one point in your life, you didn’t cook, you didn’t drive, you didn’t even walk. You’ve already gone through it and they are now habits that you do without any drama. And it continues. Have a positive week and I wish you lots of thinking and creation time to come up with some new habit ideas.