Hacking the Habit Loop

Why is it that bad habits are so easy to pick up, and good habits are so hard to create?

It’s because the common perception of how habits work is incorrect. Conventional wisdom tells us that if we want to form a good habit, we have to plod through some onerous ritual every day for 30 days, and then the habit will magically stick; if we want to break a bad habit, we have to suffer through some sort of denial before the craving magically disappears.

That sounds terrible. It’s no wonder we have a hard time managing them.

So, how then, can we better manage them? Or even take advantage of how they work, to our benefit?

The first step is to recognize that habits are, at their core, quite simple – there is a trigger, there is an action, and there is a reward. Put them all together, and you have a habit loop. That’s it.

The next thing that needs to be addressed is the language, and there are two factors here. The first is the idea of good and bad habits. Notice that in the habit loop above, there is no mention of good or bad. That’s because the only difference between good and bad habits is context and desirability. Just like a weed is simply a plant growing where you don’t want it, a bad habit is something you do that you’d rather not do. Good, bad – it has nothing to do with the habit itself. The habit just is.

The second aspect of habit language is the concept of breaking a habit. A habit is not broken – it is replaced. The crux of this concept is mired by the fact that the mechanism of replacement can range from the quite simple, to the complex. If you’ve had a habit that you previously ‘broke’ by brute force (stopping the cycle at the ‘action’ phase) – what actually happened was that the new action, followed by receiving the new reward (even if just the mental congratulations you gave yourself), was stronger than the reward you got previously. For some habits, that can work. But for other habits, the reward is a lot more complex, and you have to reflect on what, precisely, is the thing (or things) that you gain from the habit. Then, you have to find a way to get the reward(s) without performing the same action.

Habits are a crucial part of how we navigate through the world. They are a shortcut tool our brain uses that reduces decision fatigue, which allows us to save our mental energy for new situations we may encounter throughout our day. Like any tool, they provide benefit, but can also cause problems. By recognizing what they are at their core, and reconstructing the narrative around how we think of them – it becomes a lot easier to shed habits we don’t want, and embrace new habits that we do.