The Habit Loop: How Habits Form

A new year has begun. We are in a time of acute awareness of self improvement as most of us have come up with at least one New Year's Resolution. Unfortunately, most of us do not succeed in fulfilling these goals. Some of us have stopped making these new goals entirely because of the expected failure. We often feel stuck and resigned in who we are at the present time, because we feel that change is impossible. So how do we conquer our goals and empower our lives?

The key: tapping into the habit loop. 

WHAT ARE HABITS AND WHY DO THEY MATTER?

Habits rule most of the actions in our day. They are necessary tools to automate daily functioning. We develop habitual routines like brushing our teeth before going to bed, locking the door when we leave for work, or turning the lights off as we leave a room. This is in order to minimize the amount of processing energy we exert at every step of our day, and to keep our day orderly. Habits are important on a larger scale because they are what form the patterns which give us lifelong consequences, for our benefit or detriment. The routines we build are there to ensure safety, health, and mental space. But sometimes habits are unhelpful.  

One of the best books ever written on the topic is Atomic Habits by James Clear. Clear is able to break down the concept of habits, both good and bad, into four components: cue, craving, response, and reward. This loop of behavior is why habits can feel so hard to break, and is also the key to how we form new ones. 

Clear demonstrates the trajectory of lifelong habits with the example of two planes taking off from LA, with 3.5 degrees of difference. The divergence is nearly imperceptible at first, but one plane will land in Washington D.C., while the other will end up in New York City. "A slight change in your daily habits can guide your life to a different destination,” Clear summarizes. Imagine habits as these planes. After 30 years of a habit, the result could look quite different. If every day, one person spent thirty minutes on a project, versus another  who watched a show in that time, a year later one person would have a finished project while the other would not. These small chunks of progress can result in significantly different destinations. 

WHY NEW HABITS ARE HARD TO FORM

New habits are hard to form because of the simple nature of them. They are default actions, automatic responses to external signals. It is the autopilot our brain and body naturally develops to keep our day running smoothly.

Doctors struggle with helping patients form healthier routines due to the fact that “few of the traditional behaviour change strategies have built-in mechanisms for maintenance,” meaning that a patient will start out strong, but have trouble maintaining the advice of their care provider, as there is no system in place to keep the patient on track past the first few weeks, or even days. This happens as well when “the effects are typically short-lived because motivation and attention wane,” (Gardner) which James Clear discusses as the primary reason that all attempts at building new habits or breaking old ones fails. 

This is mapped out in his book Atomic Habits as what he refers to as the “plateau of latent potential”. If progress were graphed, as Clear does in his book, we would think that it is a straight line of results directly related to the time and effort put in. However, there is a delay before these results where often people feel that they might as well give up, as they can’t yet see their progress. But this is where, if time and effort remain, the results will begin to skyrocket into reward. This can be thought of as a compound interest of sorts. 

HOW TO FORM THEM ANYWAY

So how do we form habit loops that lead us to success, and keep the motivation to do so? It isn’t about the goal we want to reach. Anyone can make a goal. And it isn’t about motivation. The focus should be on the system in place to reach that goal. If the habit loop can be purposefully formed and maintained, it will lead to incremental and routine success. 

A habit is the four components of cue, craving, response, and reward. We see a candy bar, so we want it, then we devour it, and we are rewarded with a rush of sugar. It is similar to Pavlov’s behavior training in dogs, as it is essentially the same psychological process. We can condition ourselves in the same vein. If we structure our environment to trigger an action, and then in completing the action have a sense of accomplishment or rush of dopamine, we have created our own habit forming loop. 

Clear breaks this method down even more into what he refers to as “laws” of creating a good habit. The first is to make the cue obvious. The second is to make the craving attractive. The third, to make the response easy. And the fourth is to make the reward satisfying. To make a new habit successful, it must fit into our natural rhythms and set up to succeed without much thought. 

Another way to ramp up the habit loop is by habit stacking. This is simply tacking on a second habit, using the completion of the first habit loop as a cue to begin the next one. For example, you already have a habit of drinking coffee every morning. You can use this to cue a new habit of doing ten squats. Once this is established, you can stack on another. After the ten squats, you will write a to-do list for the day, etc. 

WHY OLD HABITS ARE HARD TO BREAK 

Our brain is always looking for automation, which is why certain habits seem to simply appear. They will form around whatever system we have in place. Habits are by nature an ingrained behavior, hardwired and unthinking. Dopamine is the chemical culprit to blame, the reward which is so difficult to resist. This is why pleasure-based habits are even harder to break. We often complete a habit loop before we realize it’s been triggered, and get another hit of dopamine which reinforces the loop. But if we use the inversed principles in how to create a habit, we can achieve the same success in breaking them. 

HOW TO BREAK THEM ANYWAY

Breaking habits comes with a recognition of the habit, a breakdown of what each component is for the particular habit, and a purposeful remaking of the system around this habit to create success in place of frustration. One of the best ways to break a habit is to remove the cue. Without the cue, the habit loop does not start. Just like making a new habit, breaking an old one is about restructuring the environment. If something in your environment is triggering a behavior, take it away. Hide the candy, or better yet throw it away. Out of sight, out of mind. If the loop does not start, it cannot complete itself. 

To make this easier to think about, Clear says to invert the laws of how to create a good habit. Make the cue invisible. Make the craving unattractive. Make the response difficult. And finally, make the reward unsatisfying. After about thirty days of a broken habit, the brain will reset itself to essentially forget the habit, neutralizing the original cue. 

Another trick, if a cue cannot be removed, is to replace the “response” part of the equation with another action. This does require awareness and intention, more than the removal of a trigger altogether. But the grocery stores will not stop selling candy bars, so if this is a cue for a bad habit, it must be replaced during “craving” with the response of, say, buying fruit instead. Ultimately this will give the same physiological reward, and thus over time, the visual cue will signal a new good habit. 

CONCLUSION: THE HABIT LOOP CAN BE HARNESSED 

We aren’t often taught how to form habits and we certainly aren’t taught how to break or replace them. Perhaps if it were a course in school, we would be more successful in our day-to-day lives, and ultimately become who we each wish we were as we make goals of self improvement. We can start with using the natural processes of our minds to create positive, and break negative, habits. Motivation is not necessary when there is an easy and specific system in place for daily success. If we can identify the triggers of our behavior and set up new ones, as well as understand that results take time but give compounding results, we can master our habits, and therefore, our lives.