Our lives are a culmination of our choices, our circumstances, our environment, and how we actively choose to react to those things. An even bigger guiding factor in determining the quality and enjoyment of our lives are the habits we keep. 

Habits guide our day-to-day lives, from the simplest of actions like brushing our teeth in the morning and at night, to bigger ones like exercise routines. They can be both good and bad, conscious and unconscious. A Duke University study actually found that about 40% of what we do is determined by our preset habits—not by our conscious decisions.

What do we need to know about these automatic actions, and about breaking bad habits or building new ones? How do habits form, and what are they similar to?

Let’s discuss the effects of habits and how you can better identify them in your own life. 

What is a Habit?

A habit is a behavioral action that’s become automatic or routine in our hard-wired search to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. 

According to an article about Habit Formation by Psychology Today, “habits are built through learning and repetition,” and are often in response to a certain context or goal. Habits are also described as unconscious rituals or practices that free up our brains to make more important, complex and pressing decisions.

Our habits may be negative or unhealthy, such as eating when stressed, checking our phones too frequently, biting nails, or smoking. Habits can also be positive and therefore increasingly healthy, like checking ingredient lists to avoid chemicals, hitting the home gym every morning, or taking time to meditate or journal. 

Habits vs. Goals and Motivation 

Many of us confuse our habits with goals or motivation, but there are distinct differences to make note of. While motivation is enough to get you started and help you take the first step toward goals, most goals will fall by the wayside without the formation of habits. 

The reality is that if we fail to set new habits, behavioral change is usually ineffective at best. A good example is that many of us set resolutions for the new year, only to abandon them by the time the calendar flips to February or even before. The concept of a new year’s resolution seems to lack sustained motivation because many don’t allow proper time or dedication for their resolutions to become truly habitual so they can reach their goals. 

Like most things that dictate our behavior, habits can be credited or faulted to our nervous system, which is always seeking a hit of dopamine as a reward. It’s in that way that we’re hard-wired to seek pleasure and avoid pain. 

Habits are a function of that process. According to renowned clinical psychologist and neuropsychologist Dr. Sanam Hafeez, “Any habit we develop is because our brain is designed to pick up on things that reward us and punish us.”

Motivation is the base layer, a goal is the end point, and a habit is what it takes to get you to that end point. 

How Does Habit Formation Work In the Brain? 

Our brains are essential pattern recognition machines, sorting through incalculable stimuli and messages from the outside world every day. When your brain does recognize a connection between action and reward (this is where dopamine comes into play), it sorts that information into its filing cabinet area of the brain, called the basal ganglia.

While the basal ganglia is the part of the brain where we process memories and emotions, it’s not the conscious, rational, decision-making area of the brain—that’s the prefrontal cortex.

So, the basal ganglia is responsible for initiating new habits as well as reinforcing existing habits. However, this also means that our habits are not always logical, rational, or even conscious decisions. That’s why habits can be so hard to break (especially those bad habits), but that can also work in your favor once you establish good habits.

You have to become conscious or aware of the things you unconsciously do, which can prove extremely tricky! However, if you’re capable of building the habit, you’re just as capable at breaking it. You have the framework for discipline associated with the habit already there. 

How Do We Build Positive, New Habits?

Thanks to the brain’s largely self-directed neuroplasticity, anyone has the power to set positive, new habits and the perseverance to break bad ones. Our neuroplasticity allows us to intentionally rewire our brains to create new, healthy, or positive habits. 

According to multiple studies, it takes between 18-254 days for someone to form a new habit. Of course, that’s a very wide range, and the variance in time is due to a few different factors like the habit being sought, lifestyle, existing bad habits, health, age, and our existing neuroplasticity. So, habit formation is subjective person to person. 

The good news is that the more you exhibit the discipline to create new habits, the easier it becomes to create new habits, the faster it becomes ingrained in your system as an automatic action, and the stronger the new habit becomes.

What is the Habit Loop?

In 1999, a team of psychologists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) discovered a feedback loop between cues, routines, and rewards. In his 2012 book, “The Power of Habit,” author and journalist Charles Duhigg called this “the habit loop,” thus coining the phrase.

Remember that our brains are hard-wired to find patterns that make things easier and more pleasurable for us, delivering hits of dopamine whenever possible. This is why it’s so easy to get sucked into “doomscrolling” today—it’s an easy way to get quick, pleasurable dopamine hits to the brain. Doomscrolling itself is essentially a habit loop. 

Here’s how the habit loop works: 

1. Cue: We first experience some sort of stimulus that acts as a trigger, such as an emotion, interaction, location, or even an emotional state. This signals a cue to our brain. 
2. Craving: The triggered cue causes us to seek a specific outcome that we’ve found rewarding in the past, motivating us to act and respond. 
3. Response: Seeking that dopamine rush that we’ve achieved in the past with the same behavior, we then entertain those same thoughts, actions, and behaviors in search of that outcome to seek a reward—this can be positive or negative..
4. Reward: Once you’ve achieved that desired outcome, you feel a sense of reward or satisfaction, which is the dopamine hit. That pleasure or relief you experience reinforces the original cue, and you consciously or unconsciously seek out this reaction the next time you are faced with the same stimuli.

Thus, the habit becomes a self-perpetuated loop, which is why bad habits are so hard to break. It takes significant time and discipline to set new, positive habits.

Habit Types and Benefits 

All of our habits can be lumped into at least one of three categories once a loop is formed: 

1. Healthy habits
2. Unhealthy habits
3. Unnoticeable habits

Of course, what is healthy or unhealthy can change over time and be based on context, environment, age, and other external or internal factors. It might be worthwhile to think about your own habits or tendencies and begin tracking them to categorize them, and see if you have any habits you might need to break, or habits you’d like to build.

There are plenty of benefits to initiating new, positive or healthy habits in your life, including:

• Improve your health and fitness with better, more mindful eating or exercise
  • Boosting self-esteem
  • Longer life expectancy
  • Garner respect and admiration from friends, family, coworkers, or others for your dedication and discipline
  • More effective coping skills
  • Lower levels of stress
  • Ability to learn new skills, knowledge, or even languages
  • Improved discipline
  • Increased professional success
  • Better, stronger relationships
  • Higher levels of happiness and joy
  • Better focus and mental clarity
  • Improved confidence 

To break bad habits, you’ll have to identify and disrupt the habit, replace the behavior, and consciously work to stay on track. 

• Identify and disrupt 
• Find the triggers or cues that initiate you to take part in the habit
• Change your environment to work on changing the habit or making it harder to partake in the habit
• Replace the behavior
• Swap the old unhealthy habit with something new when you feel the urge to fall back into your old habit
• Use an “if-then” statement to guide you when you feel triggered! In example: “If I feel anxious and want to bite my nails, then I will go for a walk instead.”
• Consciously stay on track
• Reward your progress. Remember Pavlov’s conditioning bell? Find a healthy way to reward yourself when you stop yourself from doing the bad habit
• Seek support—tell friends, family or a therapist so you have people to help hold you accountable 
• Prepare for setbacks! It’s okay to have slip ups in your progress
• Have patience and know that breaking a bad habit will take time and much practice

It’s important to remember that habits can have a much larger effect on your overall quality of life. Take stock of your habits, the cues and instances or environments where they occur and build yourself better habits to follow.   

Applying for your GoBundance membership today is a wonderful first step to create better habits, break bad ones and become intentionally habitual in a way that allows you to take your life, business, and goals to the next level!