The 4 stages of a habit
Day 148 / 365
Continuing the trend from yesterday, today’s blog would also be a summary of a few things that I’ve learned from the book “Atomic Habits”.
With habits, we would have 2 goals — to get rid of old bad ones and to build new good ones. To do so we need to understand the inner workings of a habit, and what happens in our brain during such habitual behavior.
The Science behind a Habit
We can break down any habit into 4 stages as shown below
We can understand this with the example of smoking. The cue or trigger might be an angry mail you got from your boss, which caused stress and thus created the craving for a cigarette. Your response was to go out and have a smoke, and the result or reward of it was that it reduced your stress. This creates a feedback loop, as your brain learns that when faced with stress, a quick smoke would give the relief. Thus next time this whole cycle would be much quicker, and soon enough you go through all these stages without thinking about it and that’s how you create a smoking habit.
How to use this to your advantage
If you want to lose a habit, you will have to attack it at all four of these stages. The first step is to identify the cues, cravings, response, and rewards. And next, you have to make them less appealing. You can start by asking the following questions.
- How can I make the cue less visible?
- How can I make the craving less attractive?
- How can I make the response difficult to do?
- How can I make the award less satisfying?
For instance, when I was trying to cut down on my Reddit use, I removed the app from my mobile so that I will be forced to use the mobile web version, which is far less user-friendly.
If you want to build good habits instead, you could use the same formula in reverse. Make the cues more visible, the cravings more attractive, the response easy to do, and the award more satisfying.
This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here
Yesterday’s blog — A different approach to creating a habit