Growing habits

FORGET BIG INTENTIONS OR RASH RESOLUTIONS, IF YOU WANT TO CHANGE ANYTHING YOU NEED TO START TINY AND LET IT GROW…

Perhaps this is the year you’re going to start meditating, growing your own veg and running before you start work in the morning? No matter how cynical about new year’s resolutions, there’s a part of all of us that likes to start the year with some intentions for the next 12 months. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a good time of year, when things are still and quiet, to reflect and reset a little. The problems arise a few weeks (or days!) down the line when we haven’t managed to achieve what we set out to do and so give up, feeling like we’re weak-willed and a failure. That’s not being pessimistic; behaviour experts say they’ve sussed why these wellmeaning, grand resolutions don’t usually work and it comes down to brain circuitry. If we really want to make a lasting change, we first need to understand how behaviours become habits and what makes them stick.

CREATURES OF HABIT

You’ll probably be surprised to hear that almost half the things you do every day are habit – because you do them without even thinking about it. From brushing your teeth, making the bed, eating breakfast, making a coffee – before we even start the working day, we’ve done around 20 things on autopilot. And it’s tapping into these habits, how they’re created and repeated, that holds the key to changing behaviour. BJ Fogg, is the founder and director of the Behaviour Design Lab at Stanford University and author of Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything (Virgin Books). He says one of the main reasons people fail at sticking to resolutions or intentions is that we make them too general and too hard. “When it comes to forming new habits, making a behaviour easy not only helps it take root so it can grow big, but it also helps you hang on to it as a habit when the going gets tough,” he says.

Knowing why you want to make a change or start a new behaviour is a good place to begin. So, if your intention is to exercise more, try to be more specific about your reasons. Ask yourself why you want to exercise more. If the answer is because you want to be stronger and have more energy, focus on this instead. And be very specific about how you’re going to do it. Fogg advises making a list of ideas for how you might achieve your new habit, before starting with the easiest idea – the one you know you can do. If exercising is your goal, it might be going for a 10-minute walk after breakfast each day or walking up stairs rather than taking an escalator or the lift. If it’s meditating, you could start with five deep breaths a day.

EASY DOES IT

Making new behaviours really small and simple encourages us to do them more frequently so they become habits, things we do without even thinking about it. “It takes repetition to form a new habit, for the neural pathways to be laid down,” says Fogg. “We’re not aiming for perfection, only consistency. Keeping the habit alive means keeping it rooted in your routine no matter how tiny it is.”

Many of us will have created new habits over the last year. One survey of 1,000 women showed that half have taken up a fresh hobby since the start of the pandemic with 67% practising their new skill at least once a week. Despite restrictions, many of us got outside more (research shows vitamin D levels actually rose in Britain suggesting more time was spent in daylight), got into the routine of doing a home workout, baked and cooked from scratch and called family or friends more. Some of these new behaviours will have turned into lasting

Making new behaviours small and simple encourages us to do them more frequently

habits, others will have dropped off as we adapted and our old routines took hold again.

To make a new habit stick, it’s incredibly useful to link it to an existing habit which creates a prompt. “We experience hundreds of prompts every day yet barely notice most of them,” says Fogg. “We boil water for tea. We flush the toilet. We drop kids at school, then hang our coat up. These actions are so embedded in our life we don’t have to think about them and because of that they make fantastic prompts.” Find the right anchor within your routine to serve as your reminder so you’re attaching your new habit to something solid and reliable – and not having to rely on anyone or anything else to remind you. Fogg explains how he wanted to get stronger so each time he flushed the toilet, he did two push ups. “It wasn’t long before the habit was rock solid. Doing push ups after I peed soon became something I did several times every day,” he says. “I got stronger pretty quickly which helped me to scale up and do more push-ups. Some days I end up doing 50 push ups (depending on how much water I drink!).”

BREAKING BAD HABITS

When it comes to unwanted habits – the things that are easy to maintain but difficult to stop (social media scrolling, procrastinating, opening a bottle of wine after work) – Fogg says it helps to think of them as a tangled rope that’s full of knots. “You can’t untangle them all at once and yanking on the rope will only make them tighter. You need to untangle it bit by bit and don’t focus on the hardest part because the toughest tangle is deep inside the knot,” he says. He explains how bad habits are not fundamentally different from good habits ( behaviour is behaviour) and advises first focussing on creating new habits, then stopping an old habit or swapping a new habit for an old one. “By focussing on creating new habits you learn the skills of change and see evidence that you can change. Good habits tend to crowd out behaviours you don’t want, the ones that are no longer in line with the person you’re becoming.” You might take the stairs instead of the lift because you now think of yourself as the kind of person who’d do that. And you have the energy for it. Removing the prompt will also help you ditch habits – if you want to stop being distracted by social media while you’re working, turn off your phone or leave it in your coat pocket. Plan your meals in advance so that you don’t need to stop at the supermarket after work, where you inevitably end up buying a bottle of wine.

CELEBRATING SUCCESS

As most of us will have experienced, motivation and willpower alone aren’t reliable or consistent enough to guarantee success. Research shows that if we celebrate our successes, no matter how small, it taps into the reward circuitry of the brain and makes us want to do it again. Unlike an incentive, which might be a long way off in the distance, a reward needs to happen either during the behaviour or milliseconds afterwards to get that neurochemical reaction which makes you feel good and makes it become a habit. After you’ve achieved your habit, celebrate it. Punch the air with your fist, tell yourself you’re awesome, write it down in your diary, put a coffee bean in a jar – whatever works for you – and notice the feeling it gives you. As Fogg says, “The feeling of success is a powerful catalyst for change.”

Once your new tiny habits form roots, you can start layering them and you’ll find this ripple effect happens naturally. So, after ten minutes’ walking, you might want to do another ten or walk faster, or you might find that the deep breathing makes you feel so relaxed that you want to do it for a further two minutes, or again in the evening, or perhaps even join a meditation class. And then on the days when stuff happens or your motivation is low, go back to really tiny: a five-minute walk or one deep breath. “The key is never to feel bad about it because you’ve done your habit,” says Fogg. Small, simple and shame-free, they’re the behaviours that stick.

It takes repetition to form a habit – we’re not aiming for perfection, only consistency