Habit To Routine

[Dinah Lianes]

Habitsare hot. Self-help articles extol the power of habits and books on the topic sell by the millions. Yet, like many pop psychology topics, the conventional wisdom about the effectiveness and application of habits is frequently outdated, misapplied, or flat out wrong. Building habits to change behavior the right way can be a wonderful tool to improve your life. But false notions about what habits are and what they can do can backfire.

If all behavior is prompted by discomfort, then habits and routines must follow the same rule. How and when we feel the discomfort of doing, or not doing, a behavior is critical to understanding the difference between habits and routines.

Some self-help books claim habits form by simply providing a reward after a cued behavior. In the behaviorist tradition, they base their claims on research showing how a lab animal, like a mouse, can be taught to memorize a path through a maze in search of food. However, while this form of learning, called operant conditioning, works well for a mouse in a maze, the model is often misapplied for humans in the real world.

Operant conditioning can be effective when a scientist in a lab coat sets up the task for test subjects to complete. However, in life, we are thankfully not trapped in cages and mazes, we must moderate our own behavior. Unfortunately, we must be scientists attempting to design our own actions. Offering ourselves extrinsic rewards makes conditioning our own behavior very difficult. It can be exceedingly hard to resist cheating. Setting up arbitrary prizes risks overemphasizing completing a goal for the sake of the reward, instead of learning to enjoy the process.

For instance, you can learn to re-imagine the difficulty in a positive way by telling yourself a different story. Instead of focusing on how hard writing or exercising every day can be, think of the difficulty as part of the journey. Know that everyone who has ever made a routine out of this behavior has struggled at some point.

For instance, if writing or exercising daily is a routine you want to adopt, finding someone to hold you accountable will increase your odds of success. Sites like FocusMate, make finding someone to work alongside easy (note: I liked FocusMate so much I decided to invest in the company). You can also pre-commit to a routine by using software like Forest on your phone and Freedom on your computer to prevent distraction and keep you on task.

For example, when you were a kid, adults had to remind you at first to wash your hands after using the bathroom. You had to focus on all the steps - turning on the water, wetting your hands, soaping up, rinsing, turning off the faucet and drying. At this point, washing your hands was a routine.

Procrastination is a good clue that the task is a routine - something that causes discomfort to do - instead of a habit. In fact, the habit in this case is the procrastination - because the action (doing something else instead) brings relief.

For example, maybe you know you struggle to remember things, so you adopt a habit of completing a task as soon as you think about it. This old habit is still helping you get the thing done - but it also makes you more prone to distraction and involves a lot of task switching, which decreases efficiency and causes fatigue.

Understanding these challenges is crucial for developing strategies and interventions for managing adult ADHD. Virtual ADHD coaching, therapy, and a supportive environment that provides structure and consistency can all contribute to overcoming these obstacles and facilitating the establishment of effective habits and routines.

Researchers have found that no more than 40% of our actions are consciously self-selected. Instead, we perform these actions in an automated way, without conscious awareness. How can you ramp up that percentage and live a more intentional life?

Waking up, commuting, walking past a particular store, or starting a meeting at work are common cues that can trigger actions as diverse as smoking a cigarette, buying a croissant, or drinking coffee.

In contrast, routines require deliberate practice. Making your bed in the morning, going to the gym, going for a hike every Sunday, and meditating are all routines that require you to keep consciously practicing them or they eventually die out. Your brain will not go into automatic mode and walk you to the gym for your weekly HIIT class.

When it comes to healthy habits, automaticity is good. Building a loop is good. But what about the actions where you actually want to make a conscious effort, the ones where you get satisfaction from pushing yourself out of your comfort zone?

Rituals do not have to be spiritual or religious. What matters is your level of intentionality. With rituals, you are fully engaged with a focus on the experience of the task, rather than its mere completion. You are investing your highest levels of energy and consciousness.

And you can virtually turn any routine into a ritual by becoming more mindful and making mental space for the action. For instance, when you eat, you could practice paying attention to the textures and the way you chew. Research actually shows that mindful eating can indeed improve the flavor of your food, making you feel more satisfied.

Showering can become an opportunity to become mindful of your body and its connection to your mind. Focus on the sensation of the water on your skin and how your thoughts seem to flow more easily. This way, a simple morning routine can become a morning ritual.

Even cleaning the house can be used to become more aware of your body movements and sensations in your muscles and joints. Just look at some of your existing routines and see if any could become more intentional.

And being aware of your consciousness levels can also help you create better habits. I call this intentional process of scaling up or down your consciousness levels when performing daily actions the Intentionality Curve. Just ask yourself:

The reason is that those habits can form deliberately, or on their own when we make consistent, but otherwise mindless decisions. Often, this difference between mindless and mindful habit formation is the difference between what you may think of as bad habits versus good ones.

Understanding the power that routines have in helping us create lasting, meaningful change is so important, in fact, that we included an entire module on it in our forthcoming online program, called The Focus Factor.

Lastly, finish your habit loop with validation. That means that you should wrap up your chunk with something that keeps you coming back! Maybe reward yourself with the cup of coffee that you started brewing pre-meditation.

Passionate about accessible education and evidence-based wellness, Laura founded The MAPS Institute, an educational wellness editorial and platform. Aside from her passion for research and educating, Laura is a classically trained vocalist, sound therapist, and a practitioner and teacher of Ashtanga and Restorative Yoga. She is the creator of the MAPS (Mindfulness, Activation, Purpose, and Surrender) philosophy and is in continual pursuit of helping her students and herself find balance amid the chaos around and within them. When not sifting through Nature Magazine, complaining about their paywalls, she enjoys trying new wine varietals, experimenting in the kitchen, riding her bicycle (sometimes cross-country), and spending time with her husband Charlie, cockapoo Miles, and expected baby girl, Ella. Click here to follow the MAPS Institute on social media.

Build your house: Figure out the habits and routines that would maximize things: not only your productivity, but also your joy, your connection, your learning, your depth. Write the plan down on paper.

I read both The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg and Atomic Habits by James Clear, and for what it's worth, I liked them. They both felt like they were written by white men (and that might be because they were!) (do you need me to explain this further? I go back and forth).1 I have a daydream that goes like this: If only I could do the same small things every day. Then I\u2019d be a sort of happy I\u2019ve never known. I\u2019d be able to make good choices without thinking too much about them. Every day, I\u2019d wake up and exercise, because I would be a person who woke up and exercised. I\u2019d eat salads for lunch. I\u2019d regularly practice piano. I\u2019d have a \u201Cwriting practice.\u201D Everything would be easier.

There are things about that life that would be easier. As a writer and artist, I\u2019m asked occasionally about my writing practice. I talk about it as though the rules are unbreakable. I wake up at 5 and I journal. I work on my book in the morning, when my brain isn\u2019t yet slushy. I get a long walk in, to think, before lunch. I write my newsletters on morning commute trains. Every night I put lavender oils on my feet and hum a church song and go to bed listening to poetry softly read to me from my phone.

These things are sometimes true. The journal habit is often true. The train-newsletter thing is usually how I do it. Right now, though, I\u2019m writing from my dining room table.2 There are, arguably, more pressing things to be doing, but I had the thought a few minutes ago that spending some time writing to you would ease my grumpiness. Who writes at 1:29 in the afternoon while it\u2019s sunny out? And yet, I do feel better right now than I did before I started writing to you. It\u2019s a routine habit happening in a non-routine way. How rebellious.

Change happens slowly. If you want to change, you have to figure out things you can do every day, so it might incrementally occur. You\u2019re not going to become a giraffe overnight; it\u2019s not possible. You\u2019ll have to add one centemeter to your neck every day at 4 p.m., and eventually, you\u2019ll look in the mirror and find you\u2019re a giraffe. (The giraffe example is not meant to be rude; I am just SO TIRED of people talking about lifting weights or jumping rope for one uninterrupted minute, so I went with this. I feel like you understand the principle, and I want you to know that, while I understand that a person can\u2019t really giraffe-ify themselves, I do earnestly think the principle is true.)

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