in Cognitive Wisdom

The Science behind Habits

image

Habits are nothing more than neural pathways in the brain. They get thicker the more they’re used, and deteriorate when neglected. You create your own habits simply by repeating activities until they get easier and easier.

The basal ganglia, is tasked with programming our repetitive behaviours so that we hardly think about them. Consider the programmed behaviour of choosing an ice cream flavour. Even at a fancy gelato shop with so many tempting flavours, we often just choose something familiar, like vanilla or chocolate.

Why? Well, thanks to our basal ganglia, it’s something we’re used to and thus something we automatically tend towards. The more we repeat a habit, the record of it in the basal ganglia becomes stronger and stronger.

For instance, after consistently repeating the action of turning on your computer and logging into your Facebook account right away, your brain will eventually just go on autopilot – that’s how we can end up on Facebook without even realising it!

The basal ganglia is often so strong that it overpowers the part of our brain responsible for conscious, reasonable decision making: the prefrontal cortex. Unlike the basal ganglia, this part of our brain takes long-term consequences of actions, as well as abstract concepts like morality, into account.

But the prefrontal cortex has one major flaw: it can get tired easily.

Making the right decisions is in fact a huge energy drain. While we might find it easy enough to resist that tub of ice cream in the freezer for most hours of the day, chances are that your prefrontal cortex will give up once it’s tired. At this point, your basal ganglia will take over and you’ll suddenly find yourself holding a big bowl of cookies and ice cream again!

Sure, you can try to make it a habit to do 100 push-ups every morning. But it’s pretty likely that your willpower will buckle after you hit 20, and it won’t be long before you open your favourite jar of snacks again. Willpower is fantastic, but it doesn’t seem that way when we’re first exercising it. So how can we strengthen our willpower when starting from scratch?

The solution here is micro habits. You can avoid the loss of willpower with minor, almost ridiculously tiny goals. After all, the main threats to our willpower are effort, perceived difficulty and fatigue – why not choose a target that only takes a little effort?

Picking an easy goal eliminates any perceptions of difficulty and is hardly daunting enough to make you feel fatigued. In other words, it’s a comprehensive cure for weak willpower.
Micro habits also get you moving, and once you are in motion, you’ll need less willpower to continue. As Newton’s first law states, an object in motion will not change its velocity unless an external force acts upon it.

In other words, the greatest hurdle we usually face is the first one: going from inertia to mobility. With a micro habit that helps you start small, you can be sure to start smoothly. In fact, you might even find out that you can achieve more than you set out to do!

If you want to learn French, make it a habit to learn one French word a day. If your micro habit is so small that it sounds silly to you, that’s great! That’s exactly how they should be.

Micro habits shouldn’t be daunting at all. They should be so small that you can incorporate several of them into your daily routine, starting out with two or three per day. After you’ve determined your micro habits, define and write down your habit cues.

Habit cues are signals that remind you it’s time to perform your micro habit. Say you want to inculcate the habit of warm water gargling before you go to sleep. What you can do is to link it with your habit of night time brushing. So the act of night time brushing could be your cue to engage with your micro habit by putting the kettle on the stovetop.

And yes, please do have a gap of at least 10 minutes between brushing and gargling. Which is the most tricky part because there is every likely hood of you getting lost in some other activity for the next ten minutes. But that’s fine because as long as warm water is there you wouldn’t have any excuse to skip this activity. This is working fine for me for the last six years and I don’t see a reason, why it shouldn’t work for you as well.

A famous Stanford University study showed that four-year-olds with more willpower (as demonstrated by their ability to resist the temptation of a tasty marshmallow) went on to do far better in life academically and socially than their less determined peers.

Willpower, it seemed, was a keystone habit that could be parlayed into other areas of life, too. Further research revealed that willpower is in fact a skill that can be learned.

But why then is our willpower so inconsistent? Some days hitting the gym is no problem, whereas on others leaving the sofa is nigh-impossible.

It turns out, willpower is actually like a muscle; it can get tired easily. If you exhaust it concentrating on, say, a tedious spreadsheet at work, you might have no willpower left when you get home. But the analogy goes even further: by engaging in habits that demand resolution – say, adhering to a strict diet – you can actually strengthen your willpower.

So go on and keep flexing the willpower muscle to get the most out of your new set of habits.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Write a Comment

Comment

Webmentions

  • Start living these 7 pearls of Wisdoms – An initiative to make you think and see beyond the obvious May 16, 2016

    […] All said and done..How should I make it a habit? It was on my agenda for far too long to be ignored anymore. So I was looking for a window of 5-10 minutes where this activity of journal writing could be incorporated. This trick of inculcating any habit is shared in The Science behind Habits […]