Strategies for Building Habits
Change can be challenging! Not just the changes that are thrust upon us, as life unfolds in all its complexity, but making changes to our lives - change that sticks - is a lot more difficult than many think.
As I’m writing this, my mum has just exclaimed that, five months after her cataract operation, she still tries to take off the glasses she isn’t wearing before putting in her hearing aids.
My son, who has just finished his Final Major Project for his college course, was genuinely asking himself why he found it so hard to apply himself in the last few days, why he didn’t do as much as he could have? I wondered “should I point out that this is true for so many people, a fairly universal human condition”?. I decided it was better for scolding him for a very human behaviour.
Because it really is true. We generally have a pretty strong sense of things we could be doing that would be helpful/nourishing/enhancing in our lives, but often a weak sense of how to achieve that!
We’ve mentioned before that one of the key reasons we find it hard to adopt new habits, to make meaningful change stick, is that we haven’t identified the “barriers” - both physical and psychological - that get in our way, and we haven’t always considered if we really want the thing we think we want. CLARITY (discussed below as well) can play a big part in getting to where we want to be.
This is crucial work, and can easily be the reason behind “self-sabotage” which we can usually spot more easily in others than in ourselves.
But supposing that you have looked at all of this, and are still struggling to incorporate some changes, there are some helpful strategies you can implement, which we will look at here in this article. Of course, not all of these will appeal to everybody - and that’s the point. Given that there is no guaranteed “one size fits all” approach, have a look at what might work for you.
TENDENCY
A good place to start is your “Tendency”. Did you do Gretchen Rubin’s quiz, to find out which you are?
You might recall that she identifies four categories:
Upholders - respond readily to inner and outer expectations.
Obligers - respond easily to outer expectations but can find inner expectations hard to meet.
Questioners - need to know the reason why, and then will respond to expectations.
Rebels - find it hard to respond to any sort of expectation.
Habits, of course, are a kind of expectation, and knowing your tendency can help you identify which sort of strategy might work for you. As you look at some of the options that we’ll identify this week, it’s helpful to view them through the lens of what you know is likely to work for you.
There are other considerations, of course. One problem with Obligers is that, being so willing to oblige others, means they often don’t have time for themselves. It may well be that their own priorities slip well down the list. This fits with their belief that it’s more worthy to put others first and creates an unhelpful feedback cycle.
There’s clearly an argument that culturally women are conditioned towards being Obligers. Certainly, a woman who puts herself first is unusual, and not exactly celebrated for that uniqueness!
Nevertheless, what we are talking about here is critically important. We’re not looking at developing the habit of tidiness, or [insert trivial example here]. We are doing what we can to integrate habits that have real and lasting impact on our health, reducing our risk of devastating diseases and optimising our chances of a long life of vitality and wellness. Who is going to thank us for doing anything that hinders that, even if it does mean they need to wash their own socks?
The other tendencies have their own issues, of course, and Rebels maybe have the hardest time of all. These tendencies also don’t tie in directly with any kind of behavioural diagnosis, but conditions such as ADHD (which many women are late-diagnosed with) obviously create their own challenges.
The best thing we can do is be aware of the challenges we face, be aware of what that means for how we operate, and work out the best strategies to get us to where we want to be. There’s no need for perfection. Good enough is good enough!
DISTINCTIONS
This is another Gretchen Rubin idea - it’s often worth looking at distinctions.
Are you a morning person or a night person? If you are a night person, clearly an early morning run is going to be very challenging for you. If you are a morning person, probably best not to schedule an evening exercise class, or to do a home workout after dinner. (That’s the good thing about doing exercise little and often, however, you just fit it in during the hours you are awake).
or a moderator? This is very relevant when it comes to those things where it might be helpful if we had less of it in our lives. Such as highly refined carbs. Do you do better with “a little bit of what you fancy”, or is it “out of sight, out of mind”? That is to say: “are you an Abstainer or a Moderator?”
FAMILIARITY OR NOVELTY
Do you prefer familiarity or novelty? If you like a lot of novelty, you might not find my exercises stimulating enough (this isn’t an issue, you can go on You Tube and find many others and still stick with this programme), but if you like simplicity and familiarity, you’ll be thriving.
Do you prefer COMPETITION or COLLABORATION? If you like competition, an app that has a leaderboard might be appealing, otherwise getting together as a group to exercise might be your thing.
Knowing what works for you can help you avoid latching onto strategies that might be great for others, and not for you.
CONVENIENCE AND INCONVENIENCE
This is an interesting one to me, because it’s often quite extreme how much of a deterrent a small amount of inconvenience can be, and this can be either to your advantage or disadvantage.
So, if you want to do more of something, make it very convenient. Conversely, making something inconvenient can make it less appealing, which is handy if you want to do less of it.
For many people, finding space to workout - even with the exercises we do - can be challenging. If you have to move furniture, dig in a cupboard for your mat, vacuum up pet hair, and dislodge a few teenagers before you can get started, chances are inertia will take over many times, and it just won’t happen. If you had the luxury of a designated room and all you had to do was go in and get started, surely that would be easier? (As long as you remember the room is there, of course!)
If you don’t have that luxury, then some people find it can be actually pleasant to make the preparation almost ritualised. Laying everything out mindfully, being aware that you are preparing to do something really good for yourself, can remove some of the stress from thinking “ugh, there’s never enough space.”
If perchance you would like to eat fewer biscuits, perhaps don’t put them in your workspace, or by the television, or the kettle - basically anywhere you might think “ooh, that would be a nice thing to eat right now”.
Sometimes, we can exchange current inconvenience for future convenience - for instance, spending a chunk of time on the weekend preparing really nourishing meals, or at least the basis for them, for the week. This makes it so much less likely that we’ll have almost no choice but to grab something less than nutritious when we realise we have no time but really do have to eat.
You get the idea. Make it easier to do the things you want to do more of, and harder to do the things you want to do less of.
Of course, this is part of the reason for our approach here - if you don’t have to get changed and showered, and you can do the exercises more or less in the space you stand up in, that has to be pretty much the definition of convenient.
LIGHTNING BOLT
I quite often talk about how change is often a gradual process and that putting the necessary pillars in place can make that change more likely, but it is sometimes the case that change can be almost instantaneous, or like an overnight overhaul. This is often in response to trauma, a diagnosis, a health scare or the like, or it can also be in response to a CLEAN SLATE type of situation. Maybe you move to a new area and you can suddenly walk to work, or there’s a gym attached to your work, or your family all decide to become vegetarian, or whilst you are on holiday you accidentally give up alcohol and decide to no longer drink- you get the idea. Sometimes a complete change of scene gives you the opportunity to let go of old habits, and start new ones.
SCHEDULING
For some people, putting something in the diary is a means of safeguarding that slot of time against other commitments, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it will get done, it’s just blocking out that time, and they might decide to do something else with that time when it comes around (endlessly frustrating to friends and anyone relying on that person turning up). This is a bit of a Rebel tendency. For others, if it’s in the diary, it will get done. This is more of an Upholder or Obliger strategy (Questioners will probably have thought carefully before they booked anything into the diary, and will keep the commitment unless it really makes sense not to (illness, for example, which might not stop an Obliger or Upholder).
Another reason for scheduling is that it’s a check-in with reality. You are happily doing your daily exercises whenever you get the chance - amazing, you aren’t going to put that in the diary. But you want to add in a couple of HIIT workouts this week. So, when? How is it going to fit in around your other commitments, and what are you going to do to fuel it? (As in, probably straight after lunch isn’t a good time, but neither is it a good idea to do it when your blood sugar is low). Maybe in fact it isn’t really feasible unless you can shift some things around. Maybe in fact every week is like this, in which case either something needs to be moved or ditched, or HIIT isn’t going to be a thing. At least you know not to beat yourself up for not doing something that it actually wasn’t possible to do.
The other aspect of reality checking and scheduling is around progress. If you are looking to gain some skills, or some muscle, you know it’s not going to be an overnight process. But looking at the available time in your life, how long is a realistic time-frame to get to where you want? Again, you would either adjust your expectations of what you can get done, or change something to make it more likely you will get to where you want to be.
LOOPHOLE SPOTTING
This ties in actually to another strategy that can be very helpful - that of “loophole spotting”. This is what Gretchen Rubin has to say about that:
We often seek justifications to excuse ourselves from a good habit…just this once. By identifying the loopholes we most often invoke, we can guard against them.
False choice loophole: “I can’t do this, because I’m so busy doing that.”
Moral licensing loophole: “I’ve been so good, it’s okay for me to do this.”
Tomorrow loophole: “It’s okay to skip today, because I’m going to do this tomorrow.”
Lack of control loophole: “I can’t help myself.”
Planning to fail loophole: “I’m doing this for no particular reason, but now that I’m here, I can’t resist.”
“This doesn’t count” loophole: “It’s a holiday!”
Questionable assumption loophole: “I’m so far behind, there’s no point in starting.”
Concern for others loophole: “If I don’t do this, someone will be hurt or inconvenienced”
Fake self-actualisation loophole: “You only live once!”
One-coin loophole: “What difference will this one action make?”
Noticing the loopholes that we commonly evoke can make it easier to avoid them!
I think it’s important to make a distinction between loopholes and exceptions, the “unless” clause that Annie Duke talks about in “Quit". When I did my cold water challenge, for instance, my intention was to have some type of cold water exposure every day (usually in an ice pod) unless I was unwell or suspected I was about to become unwell. That was my only “unless” clause, and my contingency was a cold shower if the pod was unavailable.
CONTINGENCY
Is a good thing to consider. If your planned activity was weather dependent, do you have an alternative planned? Do you have a contingency for if a friend cancels, or your favourite healthy snack isn’t available? Working out what could go wrong and finding solutions ahead of time can be really helpful.
PAIRING OR STACKING
Pairing is, as it suggests, always doing two things together, sometimes something you don’t much like alongside someone you do enjoy. Perhaps you find weeding tiresome, but you like listening to audiobooks, so you listen to something really intriguing whilst pulling up weeds. Of course it’s best if the thing you are doing to mitigate the unappealing thing isn’t downing a kilo of chocolate.
Pairing can also be an issue with a habit you want to break. In the old days, a cigarette and a pint of beer were a strong pairing for many, and breaking that association could be key in giving up one or other or both of those habits!
Stacking is more around stacking two or more habits together, and one can be the trigger for the next. For instance, I think I mentioned about my “stomp up the hill, run down the hill, do some weights, do some strikes, stretch and mobilise” pattern? Because I need to be warmed up for both lifting weights and practising my strikes, it makes sense to do these after I’ve thoroughly warmed up through the (quite brief) walking-running workout. The downside, of course, is if I don’t do the walking-running bit - perhaps the other two behaviours don’t get triggered! You could have more than one trigger for the same habit, and employ more than one strategy, too (eg, scheduling could work well here). Atomic Habits by James Clear goes into stacking in some detail.
IDENTITY
We’ve talked about this before - sometimes we struggle with stepping into the identity associated with the habits we want to embrace. We might not lift weights because we don’t see ourselves as the sort of person who does, or we think we are meant to love cake above all else when in fact we actually really do enjoy an excellent salad. You don’t have to consider yourself a runner to go running, of course, but sometimes it helps.
CLARITY
Another area we’ve looked at quite extensively - being clear on WHAT you are doing and WHY can go a long way. A lack of clarity can lead to just a vague sense that you “ought” to be doing “something”.