Habits
Over the last 7 years, and longer in particular I've been interested in developing a curated selection of habits that will help me achieve my long term goals and become the kind of person I want to be. Initially when I first started out, I often made a joke. I wish I had root access to my brain
Of course, even if I did have root access, I'm likely to be a dumb user and accidentally modify or delete something critical to keeping me alive. 'BRTH.BIN', why is it taking up so many resources, let's just kill that process. So as nice as it would be to just modify a few variables and lines of code in my brain to make me like running or want to eat or read more, I'll have to go about it the hard way.
The science of habit formation can be summed up as force yourself to do something enough times that you can eventually do it without thinking or effort. There's more to it than that of course. I listened to a few audiobooks, The power of habit, by Charles Duhigg and Atomic Habits by James Clear to learn the terminology of what I was trying to apply.
For any habit, there's 3 components that make it a habit, the cue, the routine and the reward. The cue is often a contextual reminder or trigger that starts your brain on the path to performing a routine. It might be something as simple as when you sit down to watch TV, you grab a bag of chips. The routine is the automatic behaviours that occur once the contextual cue is triggered. The reward comes from your brain releasing dopamine from eating tasty chips and watching TV.
For many of us, we're unconsciously repeating a lot of behaviours and developing habits that we're unaware of. A good example given to me in a change seminar once was, count up the number of items of clothing you have in your wardrobe and do some back of the envelope math as to how many combinations of outfits you can put together with that. It ranges in the low thousands to millions. Realistically you're not choosing from a million outfits, you would typically have some habits or routines that automate the choices for you. Check the weather, it's hot, so let's eliminate any heavy or full sleeved clothing and aim for shorts. These clothes are formal, but we're not going to a formal event, etc. Much of this is completely automatic. You may be consciously aware of some of the choices you make, but your brain is doing the heavy lifting automatically to rule things out.
Now that we know habits are triggered by cues, how do we recognise them? It's easy for us in moments of contemplation to consider that we're going to cut down on the snacks, but they are just moments. We need some way to disconnect the parliament of ideas that represents your consciousness and the thoughts inside your brain. Like a way to view a process monitor on a computer. How do we hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE in real life?
Turns out there is a way to do that too, it takes practice. Called mindfulness. I'll go into more detail about it in a different post, but it involves turning your attention inwards to the sensations of your body just existing and just focusing on different parts of your body like an attention flashlight. By practising mindfulness it develops the cognitive tool you require to have a momentary pause before any habit routine starts. It doesn't mean you'll change that routine straight away, there's been a number of times where I'd be driving, have the thought I'm about to go get a pizza or I could do something else. I would get the pizza anyway, but the thought was acting as a momentary interrupt to allow me to choose a different routine if I wanted.
So now we know that to build or modify a habit, we have to identify the cue, the routine and the reward, and we also know that to be present when the cue triggers we should practice mindfulness.
To drive home how much we are creatures of habit and how challenging it can be to be mindful. Consider that when you commute to or from work if you're driving, it's pretty much completely automatic. Your conscious awareness is not paying a lot of attention, your brain will not retain the memories unless there's something unique about the journey. We'll often take the same route, even if a faster one might open up because it's easier for our brains to follow cue, routine and reward of an existing habit.
When I wrote about the paradox of existence years ago I briefly touched on this part. Our brains are optimisation machines, they will come up with ways to conserve energy for themselves and the body they drive by forming these habit pathways that can fire easily. It becomes an efficient use of energy. Sadly this efficiency means we can develop habits that aren't in line with our long term goals, because the habits are short term efficient.
So in summary, if you have long term goals you want to achieve, then you need to curate a set of habits that will help you achieve them. So I have a goal of running a marathon. I could put on my running shoes and just start running, but that will likely end in failure. I considered that a marathon runner has some habits I'll need to develop first. Primarily that a marathon runner is going to run most days of the week some shorter distance. I can barely run 5 km at the moment, but if I build the habit of running 3 or 4 times a week, then as my body adjusts to make this habit and routine easier, that distance will increase.
Set goals, then identify habits to help you achieve them, then work on building those habits and the rest will fall into place.