Behaviours rule our everyday lives, but knowing how they are ingrained in the brain will help you hit the behaviours you choose to hold and lose those you don’t. By now I was expecting them to look different. I vowed to break one of my own when I went to write about habits- like chewing my nails. The tips remind me of what everyone knows: old habits are dying fast.

Just why habits are so difficult to make and break is a mystery. Nevertheless, the idea of changing our patterns has such an attraction that many ideas have developed around them. For example, accepted research says it takes 21 days to form a new habit or get rid of an old habit.

Sadly there is little evidence for supporting these ideas. But that is beginning to change. With developments in neuroscience, it is now possible to explore within the brain as it conducts its business, which means that we are generating an accurate picture of what happens to brain circuitry when a new habit is established for the first time. With the flick of a switch, we have even figured out ways to turn preferences on and off.

The first challenge to understand behaviours is to get to grips with what one really is. We may refer to habits in the vernacular as anything from brushing our teeth to smoking or poor table manners. Scientifically, habits are characterized relatively loosely as acts that are regularly, often unconsciously, performed in certain contexts and situations.

For one analysis on habits vs. intentions, researchers showed that students who transferred to another institution were more prone to alter their everyday habits. They also considered these patterns harder to alter than the control group, as they were not used to common external cues.

This represents work into the principle of stimulus regulation, or the influence of stimulation on actions. Stimulus management methods have also been widely used to aid those with insomnia. In brief, those who had difficulty falling asleep were advised to go to their room and lay on their bed until they were exhausted. When they couldn’t sleep, they were ordered to get up and adjust their bedrooms.

Speculative advice, but over time, researchers discovered that by associating the bed with ‘It’s time to go to sleep’ and not with certain things (reading a novel, just lying there, etc.), participants were finally able to fall asleep easily due to a repetitive process: it was almost natural to fall asleep in their bed after a positive stimulus had been established.

As we know that willpower is constructed like a muscle and can also be burned out, behavioural improvements can be helpful in getting us to perform tough things on a daily basis. Below, I will discuss some of my favourite approaches contained in scientific literature, as well as several specific experiments done by myself and others.

Task association

Reading is part and parcel of effective prose. When working for the internet, this is increasingly a first-world problem: you ‘re only a button away from the next fantastic source of motivation, and it can be hard to avoid absorbing and get stuff finished.

One approach I tried to counter that, which came out of trigger management study, is to specifically equate the ‘outlet’ with a particular mission.


I’ve found that training myself in this way has worked just as well as those salivating canines — I have less trouble getting interrupted because I know desktop = writing, and there shouldn’t be any emails or random articles on the screen.

You may also use a job connection with the environment. Your ‘job’ will be the location where you work; I’ve discovered this the hard way since I first wound up having so many ‘good’ stuff in my home office.

This made it into a nebulous position that wasn’t often synonymous with jobs. Then, consider assigning those areas to very different tasks.

It is also the most convenient to pick up a position outside the house. Will you have to write? Go to the nearest library or coffee shop and the location should be synonymous with ‘writing time.’

Reduce or increase friction

Your environment can also be tweaked to make certain tasks more difficult or easier to do. Habits are the brain’s way to simplify the movements needed to achieve the result, so using an environment to increase friction is really the best way to influence your own behaviour. Since your willpower is such a fragile thing, instead, focus your energies on making unwanted habits harder to perform.

When it comes to that pressure, the most common method is to introduce the ‘hit the ground running’ approach to the hardest behaviors.

The night before, I put my workout clothes in a bag and place them right next to my bed. I even put my jacket on the countertop by the door on cold days. Through preparing for laziness again, I’m removing any potential reasons and making stuff done while my stamina is strong.

Will you want to floss every day? It’s better not to conceal your floss in a drawer, place it out so you can’t forget it, like your toothbrush. Do you want to avoid watching too much TV? Carry the batteries out of your control region and place them in the kitchen cabinet.

Examples may go on indefinitely, so the moral here is that instead of attempting to impose patterns on yourself, you expend the time finding good habits easy to participate in, and poor habits harder to participate in.

Using conceptual prompts

According to studies on deployment goals, it’s simpler to keep a pattern cohesive if it’s designed from the current chain. In other terms, Operation X is harder to execute on a routine basis whether it is either accompanied or proceeded by Event Y. Here’s an example I have a work stop procedure every day at 6:30 p.m. After this case, which happens every day, I clean up my house (not top to bottom, just ‘maintenance’).

Since Event Y occurs every day at the same moment, it was simple to expand on the second routine since there was a catalyst I could depend on every single day, without fail. Consider arranging activities for predictable periods of your schedule: going home from college, before or during your lunch break, as soon as you wake up, etc.

Applying the ‘as soon as you wake up’ strategy to my own life, I practically learn the minute I get out of bed. While I enjoy reading, I still have a problem getting going, but this catalyst made it easier for me to reach the target of 1 book a week that I set for myself.

This approach was shown to be far more successful than ‘motivational tools’ in a variety of goal success experiments, including the one demonstrated by James Clear, which revealed how people who used the execution goals (knowing when and when they would exercise) ended up carrying along even more frequently than anyone in the control group.

Routinize with systems

No events are changing suddenly. Success is most likely the product of the successful implementation of a particular behavior, and maybe it is no wonder that evidence shows that making so many options is the enemy of long-term objectives.

In other terms, getting ‘tools’ allows it difficult to sustain good actions. I like Ramit Sethi ‘s putting this across the ‘Stability Tripod,’ or the process of routinizing certain essential facets of your existence to preserve continuity, yet to be more decisive in the majority of your decisions.

A typical financial illustration is saving vs. spending: instead of depending on the desire to raise money, take the choice directly by allowing automated deductions from your payroll to your IRA and/or savings account. It helps you to invest with less concern, as the machine has taken control of your safety by removing funds before you can see it.

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