How to Make Healthy Lifestyle Changes That Stick
As human beings we are naturally hard-wired to do whatever we need to in order to survive and thrive. In basic Biology classes we learn about Charles Darwin’s theories of ‘natural selection’ and ‘survival of the fittest’. We have two choices 1. Prove you can adapt to change and be the “fittest” to survive, or 2. Become extinct. This may sound dramatic since humans are (hopefully) not on the brink of extinction, but it does seem that people who are more resilient and adaptable to change are more likely to thrive in their lives. While change can be challenging for many of us, the good news is that lots of theories abound that describe humans as naturally health-seeking and we all have the drive to move towards higher levels of health if barriers are removed (Maslow). The science of Positive psychology challenges the belief that “people are resistant to change” and “recognizes people as resourceful and adaptive, and sees the ability to change behavior as an inherent growth and survival skill”. At the root of these theories is change. And at the root of change is neuroscience and habit formation. A few weeks ago I wrote an introductory post about habits. In today’s post, my hope is to further explore habits. We’ll look at strategies for implementing positive habits into our daily lives thus hopefully forming lasting habits that foster our well-being.
Let’s look at the habit loop again. Here it is:
The trigger is the cue that begets the habit. Our environment is loaded with cues! The smell of coffee, the friend that we hang out with that likes to exercise, the feeling of boredom that leads us to online shopping, the time right before bed where we brush our teeth, seeing your cell phone, hearing the “pings” that go off when you get an incoming text message. Our surroundings affect everything we do.
The routine is the habit we do after the trigger is activated. For the examples above, the habit would be drinking coffee every morning, going for a run with our active friend, online shopping, brushing our teeth, picking up our cell phone and spending excess time scrolling on social media.
The reward is the perceived and immediate positive feeling we get from the habit. Again, for the examples above, the rewards would be the taste and caffeine perk from the coffee, the endorphin rush from exercise, the thrill that comes with a new purchase, a clean mouth and no cavities, and the dopamine fix we get when we are connected to our phone.
Once an action is done repeatedly enough times it becomes a habit in our daily lives. A neural pathway has been built in our brains that makes the behavior easy to do. Neural pathways are like the well-travelled highways in our brains, sending signals from one part of the brain to another. Like a trail through the woods that we walk every day, it becomes easier to take this path than to make a new one. If you remember from my last habits post, 45% of our daily actions are done habitually on these neural “highways”. That’s a lot of our day that we just sit back and let cruise-control take over the wheel.
So how do we put up a road block on this highway? How do we build a new trail in the woods? In order to rewire our brains and build new neural pathways, it takes work. We have to bushwhack at the thick of trees to make a new trail. That’s not easy! It’s a myth that behavior change can be attained by self-control and willpower. It’s not a lack of willpower that affects positive change, it’s those dang entrenched neural pathways in our brain! So at the end of a long day when we’re exhausted, our cruise control begins to take over, and so do the old habits.
The good news here is that new neural pathways can be built and used instead of the old neural pathways. This flexibility of the brain is called neuroplasticity. Like creating a new trail through the woods, our brain can create new neural pathways and shut down old ones. So how do we do that? The following are some science-backed tips for habit formation and retention.
Become Aware of the Cues in Your Environment
Think about your daily triggers (cues). What are they for you? Cues can be anything in your daily environment. They can be physical, contextual, emotional, sensory, pretty much anything surrounding you. An example of a cue for me is my dental floss—I keep it in the shower so I see it and floss when I’m in the shower. Weird maybe, but the visual cue works. I keep healthy foods out on the counters and in the pantry and fridge so these are the first things my family sees and gravitates towards. My phone is silenced so I don’t have to hear the “pings” that would give me a dopamine distraction and become a time-suck. Think about your environment on any given day. What are your triggers?
Start Really Small
To have greater success, aim for smaller goals. Sounds counterintuitive, right? We often set lofty goals for ourselves and then fail to achieve them (think New Year’s Eve resolutions). To get more 'wins’ along the road to success, take your end-goal and then break it down into the tiniest steps from the beginning to the end. In Occupational Therapy, we call this an activity (or task) analysis, and we use this to break down an activity into a sequence of smaller steps or actions. The focus then becomes the very first step. What is that first micro-step that we can work towards and accomplish? By achieving success it fuels us to the next little step, and then the next little step, until we get to the last step and the end-goal.
Add a Reward
Most of us probably think of rewards as something tangible or monetary. For instance, when I finish this paper I could treat myself to a cookie. Or we give our kids a pair of sneakers that they really want when they advance to the next karate belt (no judgment, guilty as charged). Rewards have to be experienced immediately after we do something in order to build the habit. Due to this immediate need for reward, it turns out that a habit is more likely to “stick” if the reward is intrinsically connected to the behavior. Some examples of this could be: the warm fuzzy feeling of generosity we get when we do a random act of kindness, the pleasurable feeling we get when we play a game with our child, the “buzz” we get after we exercise, the feeling of calm we get when we meditate.
Consistency and Repetition
Building a new trail through the woods takes work and it doesn’t happen in a day. One thing is for sure, when we want to build a new habit, we have to keep showing up and putting in the work. In our fast-paced lives we all want immediate gratification, I can totally relate. Building a habit takes time. There’s no hard and fast rule about how much time, though on average it’s estimated to take about 66 days to form a habit, more or less. We gotta keep showing up every day to hack away at the vegetation to form our new trail. After a period of time our actions become a habit and our unconscious selves begin to take over so it doesn’t feel like as much work. Sweet success.
Habit Stacking
Habit stacking is the act of “piggybacking” a behavior on top of an existing habit to help make it stick. An example of this is ‘stacking’ the act of flossing onto the already established habit of brushing our teeth. Think about something you already do daily on auto-pilot: eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner; getting into/out of your car; brushing your teeth; showering; getting into/out of bed. Take one task that you do on auto-pilot and add something small (but meaningful) onto it. I have several habits that I stack: I put my keys in the same location every time I walk in the house so I don’t misplace them; I do a mindfulness meditation every morning when I get out of bed; I read when I get into bed at night; I drink a glass of water at every meal. Where could you stack one small new habit onto your existing routine?
Remove Barriers
Dr. Wendy Wood, a research psychologist at the University of Southern California and the author of “Good Habits, Bad Habits” uses the term ‘friction’ to describe the things that get in the way of our progress when we are trying to make behavior changes. Another way to look at it is “the thing that makes it harder for you to achieve your goal”. Alternatively, if we can figure out how to make a goal easier, we can lessen the friction. If we know we are going to be tempted to spend our paycheck, we can lessen friction by having our paycheck automatically deposited into our bank account. When we watch shows on Netflix there is the risk of getting ‘sucked in’ to the next episode because they automatically begin showing it. This is high friction that we have to work against. Likewise, grocery stores place their candy at the checkout—this would be considered high friction if we are trying to cut back on our sugar intake. How can we plan ahead to reduce that friction, especially at the end of a long day when our auto-pilot has kicked in? Dr. Wood states “Ask yourself "‘What would make it easier for me to do this?’” If we can remove friction, then good habits will naturally increase.
Disrupt Unhealthy Habits
Ultimately we want to replace an unhealthy habit with a healthy habit. The best way to go about this is to change the cues. When we can become more aware of what our triggers (cues) are, we can remove and replace them with different cues. This is easier said than done, as sometimes the cue could be a friend or spouse that trigger these less than desirable behaviors. It doesn’t mean we need to ditch our friends or spouse, but become aware that they are a trigger causing friction for us on our road to better health. Another way to disrupt the pattern is to change the reward to make it more appealing. Sometimes a reward wears off and doesn’t have the same lure as it once did. Try changing it up a bit to make the reward more enticing. There’s no question, dissolving unhealthy habits is complex. I feel another blog post topic for me to tackle in the not-too-distant future!
After a period of time our unconscious selves begin to take over! The new habits begin to come easier to us. Maybe we have rearranged our kitchen, our bedroom, our office to minimize the triggers and reduce friction. Maybe we have stacked a couple of habits together to ensure success. Maybe we’ve become more in touch with the feel-good-feelings we get when we are accomplishing these behaviors and that reward has helped us nail down a habit. It takes less mental energy to enact these positive lifestyle behaviors, thus increasing our likelihood of success. This forward momentum can help us to thrive in all aspects of our health and well-being, and this my friends, all sounds pretty wonderful to me.
