The Power of Habit

I just finished listening the audio version of Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit (Many-a-audio book has helped me deal with evening traffic on our stretch of I-95), and there were some quality take home points that I will be applying myself and that are simple enough to pass on to clients that may need a little extra help towards reaching their goals.

All of us have, or have had, bad habits. Whether it’s wasting time at work, poor nutrition choices, skipping workouts, texting and using the phone while driving or procrastinating on things you generally don’t want to do. When it comes down to it, most of us are downright helpless if we say we want to give up a bad habit. That’s right…just quitting bad habits doesn’t work.

Just like a movement pattern, these choices become so natural to us that they eventually run on auto-pilot. The brain changes and it takes less energy and focus to continue doing whatever it is we shouldn’t be doing.

Sounds pretty crappy, I Know. So what can we do? 

With poor movement habits we also know someone can’t just choose to start moving better one day. In fact, Shirley Sahrmann estimates that it takes about 300-500 repetitions to learn a completely new pattern the right way but 3-5,000 repetitions to re-wire a pattern that is already poor. 

The same concept holds true for the choices we make. In order to give up a bad habit we need to do a couple of things. First we need to identify what cues lead us to our choices. What event, environment, person etc. do we associate with the poor habit? Do you spend time on Facebook as a means of putting off work that you might not want to do right now? Whatever it is you need to identify and acknowledge it. 

From here, we can make a decision to replace our poor habit with an alternative every time that cue presents itself. We can temporarily get away with quitting whatever it is we want to give up but eventually we just leave ourselves a void that will be filled again with whatever it was we were trying to get away from. We need a positive alternative that we choose ahead of time that will fill that gap. Repeating this process will eventually lead the brain to re-wire and a new, better habit will be created. 

One way to aid in this process is by changing your surrounding environment. From the time I was a teenager all the way through college I always had a TV in my bedroom. I became completely dependent on it to fall asleep. My sleep quality was awful and I never realized why. About 6 years ago I decided to get rid of it cold turkey. For probably three weeks I couldn’t sleep at all but eventually it got better and now it would be almost unbearable to try to sleep with any sort of electronic on.

One common habit we see here with clients is lack of a proper breakfast. Because we’re always on the go it becomes easy to grab a bagel or fast food on the way to work rather than getting a good source of protein. I admittedly struggle with this when I don’t plan ahead. I love to make breakfast, especially good scrambled eggs, but to do it right means getting up 30 minutes earlier which would put me in the 3 o’clock hour. I’ve been a morning person for years but I’m not completely crazy. So for me a recent choice as an alternative habit has got to be setting aside time on Sunday to get my (simple) breakfasts ready for the week so I can just grab and go and leave them at work. As an ectomorph I have trouble keeping weight on so getting a good caloric start to the day is really important.

What’s one habit that you would like to change before the end of the summer? What cue tends to lead to you acting out this habit? And what alternative activity can you fill that void with?