By Daniel Robledo | Last Updated June 28, 2020

You wake up, you start going to your bathroom and the next thing you know is that you’re already in your office.

You just went from washing your teeth, having breakfast, getting your clothes on, and driving to work and you haven’t even realized.

That my friend, was a demonstration of the power of habits.

It would feel awesome if you can design your auto-pilot mode so that it make you as happy, productive, and healthy as possible right?

You wouldn’t be worried anymore of checking if you’ve done enough exercise, talked with your friends, or study for more than 5 minutes because you’ve already done all of it on auto-pilot.

I promise you that developing healthy habits and reframing bad ones is the single most powerful way of taking control of your life.

Today we are going to learn how to both build and break habits so that you can focus on what requires 100% of your attention and let the rest to your auto-pilot mode.

The Power Of Habits

You’ve probably already heard about Habits, and you’ve probably also thought: “Are they that important?”

Before we jump into some of the main reasons of why controlling your habits is the single most powerful way of controlling your life, let me show you a study made by the scientist Wendy Wood at the University Of California.

Wood wanted to study how many of our daily actions are based on habits, actions that we are not even aware that we’re doing them.

The results concluded that 45% of daily human actions are habits.

This means that almost half of the things you do in your life regularly are habits, it would be nice if you can make all of them to make your happiness increase, right?

The Habit

Luckily for us, habits themselves are not that complex, they are just a single chemical process in our brains.

As Charles Duhigg states in his book The Power Of Habit:

“A Habit consists of three steps; the first one is the cue, the signal that activates the habit; the second one is the behaviour, which can be mental, physical or emotional; and finally the reward, which helps the brain identify whether or not is it good to remember this process” – Charles Duhigg

There is a bit of neuroscience behind why habits appear in the first place.

According to scientific researches, habits appear because human brains, based on a survival need, are constantly looking for ways to consume less energy and habits are the perfect way to do that.

Our brains are energy consumers, they weight 2% of the body’s weight but consume 20% of the total energy supply, whenever a habit is being built, neuron-connexions are also being built.

These connections lead to very low energy consumption when performing the habit’s behavior.

To finish with, keep in mind that “neurological anxiety” is the main reason why a habit is formed.

Neurological anxiety is a term that defines the feeling the brain goes through whenever it is anticipating a reward that is coming, i.e, whenever you get trigger by a cue (which will eventually lead to a behavior and, therefore, a reward) your brain automatically starts a chemical process in which you feel forced to perform the behavior to get the reward.

You expect the reward and your brain wants it, that’s why you feel pulled toward the behavior.

The Importance Of Habits

Now that you know that almost 50% of your actions are habits, you probably understand the importance they hold.

Well, apart from controlling half of your daily actions, habits are a crucial part of human life because they are co-influent, in other words, one habit leads to another.

It is so much easier to develop more specific and complex habits when you’ve already built key habits related to that field.

For example, let’s say that you want to build the habit of running every single day.

Wouldn’t it be easier to stick to that habit if you already walk every day or if you already exercise 30 minutes a day?

You can apply this conclusion to pretty much everything you want to start doing, start with the key habits and then build up from there.

How To Build (and Break) Habits

Hopefully, you now understand how important it is to control your habits.

Let’s continue by learning how to both build good habits and break bad ones.

Develop Good Habits

Building good habits is a process that requires time and effort, keep in mind that every habit you try to build requires an initial commitment of willpower that you weren’t having to spend before.

This leads to a necessity of working on building the habit for a long time, and I know what you are thinking right now. Yes, the “21-day-rule” is a fallacy, habits take almost 66-days to stick in the long term.

The Conditional Dependency Method

You know that a habit consists of three steps: cue, behavior, and reward.

So, developing a good habit is a process that involves choosing those three stages.

The Behaviour

Let’s start with the behavior because it is usually the part that represents the habit itself:

• What do you want to do regularly?

If you are not sure what specific habit you want to build, here are some of my recommendations on crucial life habits:

• Exercising
• Talking Regularly With Your Close Friends
• Reading
• Meditating
• Building a Positive Mindset
• Developing a Focus Muscle
• Waking Up Early and Going To Bed on Time

The Cue

Now that you have the behavior, let’s choose a cue for your new habit and form a “Conditional Dependency”

A CD is a statement that refers to the correlation of a cue and a behavior:

“If X happens, then I do Y”

Conditional Dependencies are a great way of building habits because they give you a clear, specific, and non-flexible order to build the habit.

When choosing a cue, keep in mind what Duhigg states as “The 5 Categories of Habit Cues“

A habit is trigger by a cue that consists of one or more of these categories:

• Location
• Time
• Emotional State
• Other People
• Some Previous Action

Now, choose or create a cue for your new habit:

• If I need to go to somewhere near then I will go walking instead of taking the bus.
• If it is 11:00 am and I feel anxious to eat then I will go talk with a friend to distract myself.

The Reward

Alright, now that you have your new behavior, you need to reward yourself so that your brain wants to keep this new habit going.

Take care of rewarding yourself with something that contrasts your new healthy behavior.

• Play some videogames at night after exercising.
• Watch 5 minutes of Youtube for every study session you perform.
• Let yourself eat junk food one time per one full healthy-eating week.

A Long Term Road

Do not rush on building habits, making these changes to stick in your life is a slow and long process.

That doesn’t mean that you won’t see results early, in fact, you will immediately feel like something “clicked” in your daily life the moment you start changing your habits.

Break Bad Habits

Alright, let’s get into the hard part of this path.

Breaking — or reframing — bad habits is probably one of the hardest things that you can do in your life, that is exciting, isn’t it?

Luckily for us, reframing a bad habit is a simple 4-step process.

According to Charles Duhigg in The Power Of Habit, to break a bad habit you need to:

1. Identify the behavior
2. Experiment with the rewards
3. Isolate the cue
4. Design a plan

Identifying The Behaviour

The very first thing you need to do to break a bad habit is to know what you want to stop doing.

This step is easier since if you’re already planning on stopping doing something, you already know which routine you want to stop.

For the shake of understanding, I’m going to give you a personal example to follow along with these steps.

Let’s say that the behavior I want to stop doing is constantly checking my Instagram.

Experimenting with the rewards

To follow with, now that you know the behavior, it is time to answer two crucial questions:

• What is the cue, in general, that triggers that behavior?
• What is the reward you’re getting for doing that behavior?

After you have a general idea of what the cue is — we will dive deeper into this in just a little —, it is time to understand what is the enjoyment you’re getting for this bad habit.

This step may be simple in some cases but eventually, it can be so tricky since rewards are not always that obvious.

For example, I could think that the reward I was getting for constantly checking my Instagram was the novelty boost that social media gives us (which helped to trigger the behavior but was not the main reward).

When in reality I felt inside me that if I knew what my friends were doing with their lives by checking their stories on IG, I felt connected to them, I knew about them even when I wasn’t even talking to them.

In conclusion, the reward I was getting is the feeling of friendship, feeling connected to my friends.

Now that you know which is the reward you are getting from your old behavior, try experimenting with different rewards:

• Try different rewards for one week each.
• After you’ve done the old behavior and tried the new reward, write on a piece of paper the first 3 words that pop in your mind.
• Wait for 15 minutes and observe if you want the old reward.

If you don’t feel the neuro-anxiety we’ve talked about earlier to the old reward, then you have your new reward and hopefully, it is healthier than social media’s novelty boost.

For my example, I tried these rewards:

• Checking some interesting documental, video, podcast… to give myself a little bit of novelty.
  • This didn’t work very well for me.
• Talking to a friend whenever I felt like checking my Instagram.
  • This was when I discovered what the real reward was because I felt so good by talking with them that I was no longer tented to lose my time on social media.

Isolating The Cue

Alright, you are almost there, you have your behavior identified and you know both the old and the new reward.

Now it is time to isolate the cue, and let me tell you that this is easier than you may think because as I’ve told you before, every single habit cue belongs to one or more of these categories:

• Location
• Time
• Emotional State
• Other People
• Some Previous Action

To identify the real cue of your bad habit, write down everything related to one or more of these 5 categories of the previous moment of you performing the old behavior.

In my case, it went like this:

• Location: This didn’t matter for me.
• Time: Time didn’t matter so much either.
• Emotional State: I was so much more likely to check Instagram if I was in a bad or sad mood.
• Other People: It didn’t matter with whom I was to perform my bad behavior.
• Some Previous Action: If I was either taking a break or procrastinating, I was more likely to follow my bad habit.

Designing A Plan

Finally, you need to design an action plan — you can again base it on The Conditional Depency Method — to link your existing cue to your new behavior that will lead to your new reward.

This plan should look like a routine as much as possible and the more you do it, the easier it will get.

Don’t rush and permit yourself to fail, it is okay to not get a perfect 66-days streak on your new habit.

To finish with my example, I did the following things:

• First of all, I took care of my environment, I deleted my IG App from my phone and erased my account info from my password manager. Increasing my resistance to the old behavior.
• Then, I checked myself whenever I was either in a bad or sad mood after a non-work period to see if I wanted to check my IG.
• After that, if I felt like doing my old behavior, I performed my new plan according to the CDM. “If I want to check my Instagram, then I will take the time to talk with a friend later on”.
• Finally, I tracked all of my progress on my Habitica account to see how good I was doing.

I did all of this process 3-months ago and it worked perfectly, I stopped checking social media and got almost 8 free-time weekly hours back to my life.

How To Make Your Habits Stick

To finish with, I want to give some great tips to follow and mistakes to avoid if you want your habits to stick in the long term.

Don’t Depend On Willpower

Even if you are the most powerful person alive in terms of willpower, you will eventually either fail or burn out if you depend 100% on your willpower to both stick to good habits and preserve against bad ones.

You must make your resistance as low as possible to your new desired behaviors and as high as possible with your old behaviors.

• If you want to stop eating junk food, stop buying them, and get rid of the current one.
• Do you want to start exercising? Then sleep in your gym clothes.
• Wouldn’t if be nice to work more and with more focus? Turn off your internet while you’re working

Track Your Progress

You saw this one coming, right?

As I’ve said so many times before, tracking your progress and rewarding small wins is the way to go when you want new routines to stick in your brain.

• Select a habit tracking system, either physical or digital.
• Track your progress every time your cue appears.
• Do weekly or monthly reviews to see how you are doing and polish your system over time.

Avoid Common Mistakes

There as some mistakes that happen to all of us earlier or later that can destroy our hopes of changing our habits.

Not Starting Easy & Small

Don’t try to run a marathon if you can not run even 5 minutes. Start small and be patient.

Assuming Everything Will Go Great

Let’s be honest, life is mostly unexpected, prepare for something either good or bad to happen that will make you lose a little bit of track of your path.

Just be prepared and don’t be hard on yourself.

Not Setting A Punishment

This one may not work for everyone but setting a little punishment to yourself whenever you stick to your old behavior is a good way of preventing yourself from doing your old pattern.

• If you are interested in trying this technique, check out Beeminder, an App that charges you every time you fail on your new habit. A great idea would be to donate that money to some charity organization.

Not Having A Strong Reason

This mistake is both the most severe and most common of all of them.

Not having a strong reason of why you want to change your life is the way to go to failure, take the time to sit down and write down all of the reasons why you want to change, I’m sure you will find them in no time.

Take Control Of Your Life

I hope that you’re now full of motivation with all of this new knowledge and that you are already willing to start building those good habits into your life.

As always, change comes with action so I want you to start right now:

• Find a habit you want to either develop or reframe.
• Go through the identification of that habit’s loop.
• Develop a plan and try to stick with it for the next month.
• Track your progress and see how it went.

Keep in mind to be patient and be kind to yourself, the starting step is usually the hardest, keep it going!

Thank you so much for your time and let me know what you think both in the comments section and on Twitter, see you soon!

Media Credits

“The Habit’s Loop.” The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg, Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2014.