The cardinal rule of habits is “what is rewarded is repeated; what is punished is avoided.” So far, you’ve learned the necessary steps to help motivate you to begin a new habit or break a bad one. The first three stages of habit formation—cue, craving, and response—all work to help you create a new behavior. The final stage—reward—helps you duplicate the behavior.
All habits are based on anticipated pleasure because pleasure triggers the brain to remember what happened to create it. Satisfaction is the final link in the habit loop, which is why the fourth law of habit formation is “make it satisfying.” However, for satisfaction to impact behavior, the sensation must be experienced immediately.
Modern society is structured as a “delayed-return environment,” in which the rewards for many actions come at a later point in the future.
However, human nature is embedded in an “immediate-return environment” inherited from early humans and the animal kingdom, where survival and goals were daily concerns. Despite the changes to society, humans still value instant gratification over future gratification.
As far as habits are concerned, this tendency can work against or for you. Each behavior encompasses several outcome stages. With bad behaviors, the present outcome is positive, as bad habits serve some immediate purpose in your life.
However, the cumulative outcome of bad behaviors is negative.
Likewise, with good behaviors, the present outcome is less gratifying, but the eventual outcome is positive. In other words, you pay for a good habit now and pay for a bad habit later.
Because of delayed gratification with good behaviors, the best laid plans often go awry. Deciding to change your life empowers you toward positive action. But when the time comes to act, the temptation to do what provides the most immediate gratification often thwarts the process. Thus, the more you experience instantaneous pleasure, the more you should check the behavior that causes it.
Success in any aspect of life usually requires less attention on immediate gratification. Especially when forming habits, the focus typically is on sacrifice. To mitigate the strain of sacrifice, you must find a way to link small bits of satisfaction to positive behaviors. In essence, you are making human nature work in your favor.
You remember the ending of behavior more than the process, which makes the ending significant in habit formation. Like habit stacking to create a link between the reward of a current habit and a cue for a new habit, you can create a link between the ending of one habit and an immediate reward. These links between habits and rewards are called reinforcements.
Reinforcements help maintain continued behavior by allowing you to experience a win after a certain action. They are especially useful when a habit does not encompass tangible action, or habits of avoidance.
Habits of avoidance include things like not drinking alcohol for a month and not spending money on unnecessary items. The habit is one of simply not doing something you don’t want to do, so there is no real element of action that creates a sense of progress. Use reinforcements with these habits to make the behavior more satisfying.
Importantly, the reward must align with your desired identity. For instance, if your desire is to become a more frugal person, saving money for a pair of expensive boots likely doesn’t align well with the habits of a frugal person. In this case, the reward for not making an unnecessary purchase might be an afternoon at the beach or an extra long lunch break. These rewards support the identity of someone who has more freedom because they are financially stable.
As the small rewards help you maintain a desired habit, your chosen identity will build. Eventually, the identity will become the thing that reinforces the behavior because it feels good to do something that supports who you are or want to be. That satisfaction will make outside encouragement less important over time. Incentives help form habits. Identity makes habits inherent.
Another way to create satisfaction is by tracking or measuring your progress with a certain habit. When you visually track progress, the success of your habit becomes tangible and reinforces the behavior.
There are many ways to track habits: use objects to represent each completion of the habit, mark days on a calendar, or journal progress. Many successful people employ some form of habit tracking.
Research suggests that people who track their behaviors are more likely to maintain progress than those who do not. Create a visual representation of your success chain, and you will make it more difficult to break. This idea is supported by three of the four laws of habit formation: make it obvious, make it attractive, and make it satisfying.
Habit tracking makes a habit more obvious, in that each paper clip moved, day marked on a calendar, or journal page filled serves as a cue to perform the same action.
This technique makes behaviors more attractive because success drives desire. Progress is addicting, and the desire to continue feeling successful makes the behavior that led to those feelings attractive. This aspect is especially important on bad days when you’re less motivated to act.
Finally, habit tracking makes behavior more satisfying because the act of marking a day as successful is gratifying. The ability to move a paper clip or put a red slash over a calendar box becomes the reward of completing the positive behavior. Think of how good it feels to cross an item off of your to-do list. If something feels good, you’re more likely to want to do it again.
Another benefit of habit tracking is that it keeps the focus of your efforts on the process, not the goal. You are actively engaging in behavior that represents the person you want to be, not waiting to become that person.
There is no such thing as perfection. Every person, no matter how committed to changing behavior or tracking progress they may be, will face a moment of failure. Crises happen, weather happens, and changing life circumstances happen. The perspective you bring to the process of behavior change will determine how successful you are in the long run.
There are a number of pitfalls that can derail progress during behavior change: the burden of habit tracking, the disappointment of breaking the chain, and the folly of tracking the wrong measure.
Habit tracking in and of itself is a habit. The requirement to start a new habit to help you begin another at the same time can feel overwhelming or like a burden. Why add another habit to keep track of when it’s easier to say, “I’ll simply make more business calls” or “I’ll just write one joke a day”?
To help ease the burden of forming two habits at once, consider these mitigating actions:
1. Start with aspects of life already automated to track activity.
2. Only manually track significant habits.
3. Record the tracked measure immediately after the behavior is completed.
It is inevitable that you will break the chain of a good habit at some point. But the end of a streak doesn’t have to mean the end of the habit. Missing one day will happen. The key is to try to avoid missing two or more days in a row.
The downward spiral of repeated missed days of action is what leads to the end of good habits and the formation of bad ones. One missed action makes it easier to not do it again, and so on. An all-or-nothing mentality creates the false assumption that if you can’t do it perfectly, you can’t do it at all. But missed action hurts you more than a successful action helps.
As stated earlier, showing up for your habit strengthens your identity, which is a major motivator in habit formation. Even on bad days, not putting up a zero for effort will be more significant than what that effort entails.
Society is driven by numbers. We are consumed with measuring success according to quantifiable proof, rather than the idea behind what the numbers represent. This instinct can lead you to measure the wrong thing when tracking habits.
If you make your measure of success a quantifiable number, you will do whatever it takes to make progress toward that number, even if the action is unhealthy or outside your identity. Therefore, if you choose the wrong measure, you will create the wrong habit.
For instance, when trying to become a healthier person, focusing on the number on the scale will lead you down the wrong path.
Each measure you track should be a vote for the identity you want. The habit of tracking measures is meant to provide meaning to the action and motivate you, not make the measure the ultimate goal. Just because something can be measured, doesn’t mean it should be, and vice versa.
Instead of measuring the number on the scale, find nonscale victories to measure to keep the behavior satisfying.
The key is to find the measure that makes maintaining a habit consistently rewarding and allows you to continue becoming the person you want to be.
The inversion of the fourth law is to “make it unsatisfying.” In the same way that adding a small reward can motivate behavior, adding a small consequence to certain behaviors helps reduce the motivation to act. Bad habits serve you in some way, which makes breaking them hard. The more instantly costly a bad habit becomes, the faster you will turn from it.
Find ways to hold yourself accountable for your actions, and slipping up or behaving badly will now have consequences. If you reframe bad habits so they elicit an instant punishment or sensation of pain, you will start plotting how to avoid them.
A habit contract can create accountability in your life. It’s a verbal or written agreement with one or two other people that states your intended habit and the consequences of not following through. Habit contracts are like laws that keep people in check.
Your desire for respect and approval is a major motivator, and not wanting to fail or appear weak in front of others is a powerful incentive for good behavior. It’s easier to break promises to yourself than it is to break promises to other people. Decide what habits you want to create or break, and make the consequence of failing to do so significant.
For accountability to work, the strength of the consequence must match the strength of the benefit gained from the behavior. Whatever the consequence is, make sure someone else knows about it who is in a position to notice when you don’t succeed.