Habit

A habit is a behaviour that is repeated with some frequency, often in response to some stimulus. Many habits include some amount of automaticity meaning that you might do it without really thinking about it like opening the fridge and looking in every time you enter the kitchen. Some habits are undesirable like eating or smoking in response to stress while others are preferred like brushing one's teeth.

Habits are built by repeated execution of the behaviour with rewards.

Habits have a few common components:

• A trigger is needed to initiate execution of the habit. That could be for instance walking through a coffee shop on your way to work, or a notification on your phone.
• You perform the action. Buying a coffee from the coffee shop, watching the video your friend shared.
• You get a reward. Drinking delicious coffee, the video was funny. Especially in the beginning when establishing a habit it is important that the reward is desirable and that you know quickly that you will receive it. This is why a clicker is often used for training dogs. By using a clicker, the trainer can signal to the dog that they did good and earned a reward even more quickly than they can actually physically deliver the reward to the dog's mouth.

Tips for building habits

Have a clear and reliable trigger for your habit. If you want to put a habit on a trigger, the trigger should be sufficiently obvious that you are going to notice it. If you don't notice the trigger you'll be unable to perform the behaviour and reinforce the desired habit. Additionally, if you don't implement the habit every time you notice the trigger, you will be training yourself to not perform the behaviour in response to it.

You can use the completion of one behaviour as the trigger for the next. This is called habit stacking and can be used to build up quite complex routines.

Suggestions for habits to work on

• Flossing: Flossing is a simple habit. When the routine has been established it is easy to do it while mostly focusing on something else. If flossing the whole set of teeth seems like too big of a commitment at first then make a system to only floss half or quarter of the teeth every day.
• Budgeting
• Consistently drinking more water
• Reading
• Journaling: A possible way to break this into smaller pieces to get started is to commit to just writing a title for a journal entry each day, no other content necessary.
• Capture all tasks and responsibilities in a single or a few inboxes as per Getting Things Done.

See also

• Implementation intentions

External resources

• Book: Atomic Habits by James Clear
• Book: The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg