How to change your habits.
It is almost impossible to eradicate a habit, instead, it must be adapted or replaced. This process of changing a habit can actually be relatively painless when we apply the following rules:
To change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.
Use the same cue.
Provide the same reward.
Change the routine or some aspect of the routine.
You can have success changing almost any behavior if the cue and reward stay the same (with the exception of extreme addictions). But this isn’t always enough: For a habit to stay changed, people must believe change is possible. In many cases, this belief only emerges with the help of a group (e.g. Alcoholics Anonymous).
Basically: One way to dramatically increase your odds of success is to commit to changing as part of a group.
How to do it
Keeping in mind that all habits follow the loop of (A) cue, (B) routine, and (C) reward, you first have to identify the (B) routine.
With most habits, simply put, it is the behavior you want to change.
Example: Every evening you come home put your keys down on the counter and pour yourself a glass of wine.
The second thing you have to do is start to experiment with the reward that the habit provides. When you sit down and look at your habits, most rewards are obvious in retrospect, but incredibly hard to see when we are in the moment.
To figure out which cravings drive particular habits, think of yourself as a scientist collecting data. You can experiment with different rewards and see if they provide the desired effect. As a scientist, try to make this process completely academic. Don't tie yourself emotionally to any success or failure while you test out alternative methods of getting the reward. Be patient! This can take days, weeks, or longer
When you feel the urge to start the routine, adjust it so that it delivers a different reward. E.g. Instead of putting your keys down and grabbing the glass of wine, grab a leash and go for a walk around the block with your dog. The next day, try grabbing your meditation app and doing 5 minutes of relaxation. The next, a Facetime call with a good friend.
What you choose to do instead of your original reward isn’t important. The point is to test different hypothesis to determine which craving is driving your routine.
By experimenting with different rewards, you can isolate what you are actually craving, which is essential in redesigning the habit.
Next, we have to isolate the cue. The reason why it’s so hard to identify cues that trigger our habits is because there is too much information bombarding us as our behaviors unfold.
E.g. Do you grab the wine glass (1) because your blood sugar is low, (2) because you're stressed from work, (3) because you are lonely?
To identify a cue amid the noise, we can identify categories of behaviors ahead of time to scrutinize in order to see patterns.
Almost all habitual cues fit into one of five categories:
Location
Time
Emotional state
Other people
Immediately preceding action
Lastly, come up with a plan. Once you’ve figured out your habit loop — you’ve identified the reward driving your behavior, the cue triggering it, and the routine itself — you can start to shift the behavior.
Remember the habit formula: When I see (A) CUE, I will do (B) ROUTINE in order to get (C) REWARD.
To re-engineer the formula, you just need to start making choices again. Break the loop by changing it up. The easiest way to do this is to make a plan, test it, and evaluate the results.
