When masking was made mandatory at the beginning of the pandemic last year, I had to find a way to build a new habit quickly. But habits are not made in a day. Still, I made a conscious effort to start building a new habit. For everyone in the family.

I placed a table near the shoe rack and in there went our masks in separate bags. The moment we went to change into shoes for going out, our eyes would fall on the mask bags and we would put them on. It took us less than two weeks to reach a level where if we forgot to wear the mask, we would feel something amiss by the time we reached the gate.

We had managed to form a new habit in two weeks.

In a study, neuroscientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology identified neurons that fire at the beginning and end of a behavior as it becomes a habit. Here is what they say (taken from a more readable source):

These neurons are found in a part of the brain known as the basal ganglia. The name feels like an HP spell, but it’s a part of our body and an important one too. It has many functions, one of them being reward processing. 

So how does that impact our habit forming?

The habit loop

The neurons fire at the beginning of the chunk due to some trigger or cue. At the end of the “chunking” our task is accomplished and we feel a sense of achievement, which might be associated with a reward, psychological or physical. Between the trigger and the reward lies the action or routine or tasks that we want to convert into a habit.

In Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg calls it the habit loop. A cue triggers craving for a behaviour, the behaviour starts automatically and on finishing it the brain receives its reward.

When this loop of cue and behaviour and rewards gets neurologically intertwined, our brain motivates us to follow this loop repeatedly. That’s why it is difficult to break a habit, whether good or bad.

And these are the steps you can take to start building a new habit:

1. Decide the trigger action. It might be changing into track pants for running, pulling out the mat for exercises, the study clock chiming at a certain time, whatever works for you.
2. Follow up with the action you want to take. Start small, and then gradually increase the duration or intensity.
3. Decide how you will reward yourself. It can be something physical like playing a mobile game for 15 minutes or psychological like affirmations to yourself.

When I went to college, Nirula’s was all the rage. Every time I walked into any outlet, I would order the same ice cream – 21 Love. Many times I would decide beforehand that I will order some other flavour. But whenever I walked into the outlet, I had such strong cravings that I ended up ordering 21 Love.

Or, I would always order the Veg Thali in Nathu Sweets because the moment I entered a huge poster of the Veg Thali with its delicious looking naan, paneer ki sabji and dal makhani would greet me. That too on a red background. It fired the taste buds so intensely that I couldn’t help but order it. 

It was some months before I realised that if I sat outside and ordered from the menu, I would order different items. But the moment I would walk inside the outlet to order, it was always the same Veg Thali.

Do you see a pattern?

The image triggered the habit of ordering the same food item. When the trigger was not there, I explored the menu.

Marketing gurus have used the concept of cues and triggers for centuries. It’s time we use it for our own advantage.

Stacking habits

On reading further about the MIT research, I found something more interesting. What we call one action or behaviour between the trigger and reward, the brain treats as a series of actions. For instance, we might treat brushing teeth as  one action but for our brain it is a series of actions like picking up the brush, picking toothpaste, putting it on the brush, brushing the teeth, rinsing the mouth, cleaning the tongue, etc. This series of actions looks like a stack of data and instructions that we build in computer memory while doing a task. 

Which also means that we can sneak in an action or two into this stack and the brain would make it part of an already existing habit. Neat, isn’t it?

For instance, you can write in your journal immediately after finishing your morning cup of tea. As you’re starting this new action on top of an existing action, it will be easier to stick to this habit.

When you try to do something new at a new time and location, the habit loop has to start from scratch. And it will take that much longer to trigger the behaviour automatically.

Why do we need good habits for success

When you want to build a new habit you must repeat the habit loop so many times that the brain neurons get fired automatically at the trigger and you go through the rest of the actions automatically.

Have you ever wondered why we want the brain to do things automatically? 

Every decision that we make saps a bit of our mental energy. When we do something automatically, we do not dip into our store of mental energy. So what do you think is beneficial to be mentally fit? Needing to make decisions every minute of the day or doing things automatically most of the day? It’s obvious that if we can do most of our tasks automatically, we remain mentally alert at the end of the day. On days that we need to make lots of decisions, mental fatigue automatically sets in.

The best thing about habits is that it reduces the need to spend precious mental strength on mundane tasks.

Some tips to build good habits

The topic of building good habits is unending. I have been reading on the topic for many years, and implementing many of them successfully too. I often fail at it too, so I have dipped into my experiences and tried to list out some tips for you:

• Identify your daily habits, however mundane, on which you can start new ones.
• Be convinced of the need for a new habit before you try to build it.
• It is easier to replace a bad habit with a good one rather than eliminate it.
• To eliminate bad habits, we need to eliminate the friction to developing good ones.
• Habit is about getting into the habit loop, not self control.
• Successful self-control happens more frequently if the temptation itself is not there.
• If there are multiple habits you want to build, start with one. Stack it on an existing one and then go from there.
• Think of what the habit will achieve for you; it will be easier to start with it.
• Try to have a partner, or at least an accountability partner, for every new habit.

Final thoughts

I took the example of brushing teeth earlier because it is a habit that all of us form, and that too at a very young age. 

If we can form a habit when we don’t even understand what it is, it should be possible to build new ones when we are conscious about it.

Or, does it make acquiring new habits more difficult simply because we are conscious of making a change? I would call that the language of naysayers.

I say that habit’s but a long practice, friend,

And this becomes men’s nature in the end.

Evenus

I have touched just the tip of the iceberg called building new habits. Maybe some other day I will explore something more about it. Like, how to reduce friction in your environment so that it is easy for you to start on a new habit. Or, why you need an accountability partner for successful change.

Is there something specific you would like me to talk about? Comment or DM me and I would be happy to write about it.

What are the habits you have been able to build successfully? Share your story with us so that we can benefit from it and get motivated.

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