Habits can form from cues you aren’t even aware of. You are taking in information even when you don’t realize it. In the world of habits, this means you are reacting to cues and forming habits often without your knowledge. To be able to form a good habit or break a bad one, you must start with awareness of the habit and the cues that create them. Therefore, you need to find ways to make your cues and habits obvious.
Making a list of your daily activities helps bring your habits out of the unconscious to the surface. A habit scorecard is one way to keep track of the things you do regularly. Create a list of all the actions you make on a daily basis so your habits are brought into view.
Once you’ve filled out your scorecard, determine which habits serve you, hurt you, or neither in the long run. All habits are formed to address some issue or problem in your life, and only you can be the judge of which ones cast votes for the person you want to be. There should be no judgments or criticisms about any particular habit. You are simply mapping the ones that serve you and the ones that don’t. One way to determine which habits serve you is to think of their net outcomes.
These steps not only expose your current habits but also see the cues that trigger them.
There are two effective methods that can help you implement better habits into your life using the habit scorecard: implementation intention and habit stacking.
Implementation intention simply means making an advanced plan for what you will do and when you will do it. Research shows that scheduling an action or activity increases the likelihood that it will get done. Therefore, the two most common cues are time and place. Implementation intention harnesses the power of both for your benefit.
Trying to create a new behavior arbitrarily requires too much effort. You have to remember what you want to do and become motivated to do it. For instance, you may say, “I will exercise more each day,” and leave it at that. But what sort of exercise will you do? When will it happen? For how long will you do it? When faced with these questions, it is easy to become overwhelmed or indecisive. When you experience these feelings, you are more likely to lose motivation.
Be as specific as possible to help you stay on track. Rather than saying, “I will exercise more each day,” describe in detail what that means. Even stating, “I will walk each day,” is too vague. Keep narrowing the action down until it’s clear.
Specificity removes the need for inspiration or motivation to kick in. All the decisions have already been made. You just need to perform the intended action.
The point of implementation intention is to address the first law of behavior change. When you make time and place obvious, you are training your brain to create an association with those cues. After enough time, the actions will become automatic, thereby forming a new habit.
Some habits are not meant to be daily habits. For desired behavior changes that occur infrequently, try setting the first day of each week, month, or year as your cue. The first day of these time markers tend to feel like a blank slate and inspire optimism, which may help motivate you to act.
Habit stacking exploits the phenomenon of accumulating behaviors, known as the Diderot Effect, to help create new habits. This effect describes the tendency for one major purchase to lead to another and another. Behaviors follow a similar tendency because no behavior exists in a vacuum. One action triggers another and so on. Understanding this fact helps you use current habits to build new ones.
The Diderot Effect
The Diderot Effect was named after French philosopher Denis Diderot who lived in poverty. One day, Diderot came into a large sum of money after selling his immense library of books.
After using the money for some essentials, like paying for his daughter’s wedding, Diderot bought a silk robe. The robe stood out among his shabby home, so he started purchasing other fine items to match, which led to more fine purchases until his money was gone.
Rather than planning a new time and location for a new habit, habit stacking links a new behavior to a current one. The reward of the current habit becomes the cue for the new behavior.
Habit stacking can also work with routines. Say you have a nightly routine as follows: You finish dinner, wash the dishes, wipe down the counters, and set the coffeemaker for the morning. If your desired identity is someone who eats healthier foods, you might implement a habit that supports that identity. Your routine might become: You finish dinner, wash the dishes, wipe down the counters, place a bowl, spoon, and box of cereal next to the coffeemaker, and set the coffeemaker for the morning.
The example of laying out the bowl, spoon, and cereal highlights an important aspect of habit stacking. The cues you wish to create must make sense for the habit to be triggered and the follow-through to be successful. You must take into account which habits fit into which routines and when.
As with implementation intention, make the behavior you will stack and the behavior upon which it will be stacked as specific as possible to create the highest level of success.
The way your environment is designed and utilized has a major impact on your behaviors. We are constantly influenced by environmental factors without realizing it. For instance, when we walk into a quiet room, like a church, we automatically whisper. Environment shapes behavior, which makes habits more dependent on context than we know.
The previous example of setting out items for cereal signifies another important aspect in behavior change—the power of sight. Of the nearly eleven million receptors in the body, sight uses 90% of them. Therefore, visual cues are the biggest instigators for action.
These types of choices are not due to thought or motivation but because they are more convenient.
In your own life, your habits center around what you see and what appears convenient. To form and maintain good habits, ensure that the right visual cues exist in your environment. You become the architect of your behavior when you design your environment to support obvious cues.
One way to organize your environment for success is to learn the context embedded in a cue. Objects in and of themselves are not cues alone. Your relationship with the object—the context by which you understand the object—is the trigger.
At first, all cues will be specific, but over time, the associated behavior will become linked to the general context of the cue.
Different cues develop different contexts for every person.
Your unique relationship with objects is useful in training your brain to view a particular part of your environment in a particular context. To create better habits, ensure that each object or space is only associated with one context. When contexts overlap, it’s easier for the easiest action to win out.
It’s always easier to form a new habit in a new environment because you’re not fighting old cues. However, if you are not able to change environments, redefine or rearrange yours to create different associations. Create zones for different behaviors, such as only eating at the table or only working at your desk.
The more you can create a stable and predictable environment with clear contextual cues, the more stable and predictable your behaviors will be.
The inverse of the first law—make it obvious—is make it invisible. If you want to quit a bad habit, you must remove the cues.
Despite what you’ve been conditioned to believe, discipline and self-control are not the most important aspects of habit formation. You can break bad habits, but you won’t forget them or their cues. Once a habit is ingrained in the brain, the craving that triggers it will automatically kick in whenever the cue resurfaces.
Willpower is a temporary solution; changing your environment is a long-term solution. When you create a predictable and stable environment, the need for discipline or willpower is reduced.
Reducing exposure to a bad cue is like cutting off the fuel supply to the engine driving the habit. You’ll always remember how to drive, but you won’t be able to start the car.
Bad habits often create the cues that trigger behavior. The habit creates a new sensation that triggers the same craving. This trap is known as “cue-induced wanting.”
Create a more positive environment to reduce your vulnerability to this detrimental cycle.