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Changing Old Habits And Creating New Ones

I just finished a fascinating and illuminating book called The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, and I wish I had read it when I first ditched the booze! It sheds a lot of light on why we do the things we unconsciously do, and I thought I’d share some of the main takeaways with you. So, what exactly is a habit? Duhigg explains that it is a choice that we deliberately make at some point, and then stop thinking about, but continue doing automatically as if on autopilot.  In fact, over 40 % of our actions are habits, which are necessary to prevent our brain from being overwhelmed from the complexities of life. “[Habits] can emerge outside our consciousness or be deliberately designed. They often occur without our permission.”

This definitely echoes my experience with alcohol; I certainly never intended to become a grey area drinker (read my post on grey area drinking here). But like clockwork, every evening I cracked open a bottle, whether I felt like a drink or not. The good news is, habits can be changed. The first step, as is so often the case in life, is awareness.

According to Duhigg, each habit is a loop that is made up of three parts: a cue, a routine and a reward. The first step is identifying the routine. Take me, for example. At 5 p.m. I would pour myself a glass of wine while I started preparing dinner. That was my routine. Next comes the cue. It can be all sorts of things: boredom, stress, loneliness. For me, it was the time of day; it was a transition period from work to home life. Finally, the reward. This part is trickier: to identify the reward we get from a routine, sometimes we have to dig around a little. What is the feeling we’re after? Maybe we’re bored and are looking for some stimulation. Or we’re stressed and this is a way we’ve found to decompress. You get the idea. My reward was the feeling of taking the edge off after a stressful day at work, i.e. relaxation.

The Golden Rule of Habit Change

Duhigg’s golden rule is this: You can’t extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it. To do this, we need to follow three steps:

      1. Use the same cue.
      2. Provide the same reward.
      3. Change the routine.

No need to reinvent the wheel here, all we need to do is change the routine.

So, let’s take this back to my example. We’ve established that my routine was my first glass of wine in the evening (which invariably turned into 3, 4 or more). It was prompted by the time of day, i.e. the end of my workday, and the reward I got was a feeling of relaxation (which lasted all of five minutes, given alcohol’s craving-enducing nature, but that’s a whole nother post).

Knowing this, we can now make a plan to alter the behaviour. What other things could I do to get that same feeling? I love walking in nature; there are beautiful trails here right outside my doorstep, and I always feel calmer and lighter afterward. So, I could replace that glass of wine by a brisk walk in the woods. Also, I find nothing more soothing than a good long soak in the tub. If the walk in the woods didn’t do the trick, I could try the bath. Those are just a few examples. I would likely need to experiment a little to find the right replacement routine.

And that, in a nutshell, is how you can change a pattern of behaviour – any pattern. From stress eating to drinking to compulsive scrolling, the technique is the same.

Obviously, some habits are harder to crack than others. Alcohol is a trickster and won’t go down without a fight. Also, knowing you can change isn’t enough either: you have to believe that it’s possible, and you have to want to change.

But awareness of our habits is already a huge step in the right direction. Armed with these new realizations, we can turn off the autopilot and get behind the wheel of our life again.

Happy habit hunting!