CA098: What are habits and why they matter

What are habits and why they matter

Your habits are key to who you are and the change you want.

Habits underpin what we do at Brilliant Living HQ.com and on the Changeability Podcast – mind management for your best life and business and how to make changes.

Lasting change, i.e. achieving your goals – is not the result of a one off transformation but a product of daily habits.

What do you want to achieve? What do you want to change?  Whatever it is, getting it is the result of your habits.  Habits play a role in what you look and feel like, in your success and relationships.

All of which makes it slightly surprising we’ve got to episode 98 of the Changeability Podcast before dedicating and episode to habits – but here we are and this is it.

So what are habits?

Habits are the things we do, but also and maybe as importantly, the way we think and what we believe.  They include the self-beliefs that influence what we do, our behaviour and the actions we take.

A habit is the repeated thinking and behaviours that become automatic, so we don’t mostly think about it.

We need to know how we form habits in order to change them.

Habits have certain characteristics or constituent parts that keep us doing them.

Cues, routines and rewards

There’s a cue that initiates the behaviour.

A cue is a trigger, or reminder, something that triggers our thought or behaviour.  Like the cue line in a play, (the line before you come in) which on hearing it reminds you to say your line, or triggers you to deliver your line.

Then comes the routine.  This is the behaviour or action that the cue has triggered – and the bit we think of as the habit.

This is followed by the third part of a habit – the reward.  This is the bit that is of benefit to you in some way, even though it might not actually feel like that, your brain is seeing it’s benefit.   Because it’s a reward or benefit your brain wants you to repeat it and so you do until you’ve done it often enough it becomes a habit.

This forms what Charles Duhigg in ‘The Power of Habit’ and Stanford professor B.J. Hogg in ‘Tiny Habits’ call the ‘habit loop’.

Many of our everyday activities involve habits with a cue, action and reward.  Here’s a few you probably repeatedly do and don’t really think about them :

• Cleaning your teeth
• Tying your laces
• Riding a bike
• Driving - remember learning to drive and how painfully slow it was having to think of each step every time. Whereas now it’s such an ingrained habit not only do you not think of each step, sometimes you can’t even remember driving somewhere.

Then there’s certain ways of behaving we get into which quickly become habits for example,

• Getting in the habit of going to bed or getting up early or late.
• Eating certain types of food or at certain times of the day. Why do we tend to eat different things for breakfast to dinner? There’s not really any reason, it’s a habit born out of convention.

Then there are the habits you think of as bad or unhelpful.

• Julian bites his nails and worse!
• Kathryn procrastinates, gets distracted by social media and emails and eats snacks late at night. That’s just for starters...

If you want proof of the power of habit – if proof were needed – just look at your pet.  Our dog Dude not only knows the time of day but exactly what should be happening in his world at what time and what order.  Especially when it comes to food and walks.

Why we need habits

Habits help us manage our minds. 

Habits save us brain power – or rather free up our brains to do exciting creative thinking.

Making habits out of the things we do repeatedly, our behaviours and actions – provides our brain with a power saving or effort saving m