Introduction
If you’re like most people, there’s a gap between the person you are and the person you dream of becoming. There are small things you feel you should do and big things you should accomplish. Whether it’s exercising regularly, eating healthy, learning a language, working on your novel, reading more, or simply indulging in your hobbies instead of mindlessly scrolling through social media, it sometimes feels like to achieve your goals, you have to become a different person. Someone diligent, disciplined, putting in more effort, and having more willpower. Maybe you’ve tried your best to be that person. And it worked… for a while. Until you found yourself slipping back into old habits. In the end, it seems like you always fail. And with each failed attempt, you become more and more frustrated and disappointed in yourself. If you believe the “success stories” on the internet, it’s entirely your fault: if you don’t succeed, it’s because you didn’t want it enough, and the problem lies within yourself. But the truth is, change is actually hard. And just like most things in life, understanding the why makes it easier.
The Jungle of Your Brain
Imagine your brain as a lush and dense jungle. Navigating your brain, for example, deciding to do something, is like trekking through a real jungle: it’s tough and it costs energy. Your brain hates spending energy, so it has found a trick: all your actions and behaviors leave traces in the jungle of your brain. When you start doing something, you trample plants and create improvised and rough trails through the undergrowth. The more you do that thing, the more pronounced the trail becomes. Over time, it turns into an easier path to follow, so you take it more often and it becomes a street. By repeating what you do, over and over for years, the street turns into a highway. The crossing becomes effortless, familiar, and comfortable. The more pronounced your brain highways are, the more accustomed you get to their comfort. So, we continue to use them, which means we tend to do what we’ve always done. That’s why change is difficult, especially in adulthood when your jungle is crisscrossed by many established streets and highways. To understand how these highways are built, we need to distinguish between two concepts: Routines and Habits.
Routines and Habits – The Things You Do
A routine is a sequence of actions that you perform in the same way every time because they have worked well for you. For example, buying the same ingredients for your favorite dish and cooking them in a certain order because you enjoy the taste of the result. Or, setting an alarm for 6:30 am before going to bed because that’s when you want to wake up. Imagine routines as being executed by a wise planner. It is slow and analytical, responsible for strategizing and mental calculations. The planner is aware of the future and carefully considers what kind of outcome you want. Based on that, it chooses actions to achieve specific results, even if they are uncomfortable, like taking a shower after getting up.
Routines can eventually turn into habits, which seem much easier because they are essentially a sequence of actions carried out without even thinking about them. You’ve done them so many times before that your brain considers them rewarding and an excellent response to a situation. So, a habit can feel like you’re on autopilot. You don’t have to convince yourself to do something that’s a habit – you just do it.
The important thing about habits is that they are triggered by cues, cues that can be simple things or entire situations, which give your brain the signal to start the behavior or action. You already have a lot of triggers in your life: like when you see your phone, you almost always unlock the screen. Or when you sit in a car, you fasten your seatbelt. Or when you buy your coffee before work, you also grab a cookie, even if you’re not really hungry. Habits are executed by a little impulsive toddler. It responds to your immediate desires, depending on what’s around you. And it doesn’t care about long-term goals. For the toddler, the future doesn’t exist, and it hates hard work. So, when it detects a trigger, it directs you to an easy route inside your brain that leads to a familiar and rewarding outcome. If you get coffee, the toddler wants the cookie too, simply because that’s what you do every morning.
This rewarding feeling is also at the root of most of your bad habits: chocolate is tasty, scrolling through social media is sometimes mildly entertaining. That’s why you repeat those actions, even if they are bad for you. The rewarding feelings associated with an action demand to be repeated, and thus, a bad habit is born.
While the toddler may seem like a built-in sabotage mechanism, it is also as important as the wise planner, and, in fact, they work together most of the time! You need your wise planner to come up with great ideas, to parallel park, and to do your taxes. But letting your habits, managed by the toddler, take care of repetitive and mundane tasks allows your brain to easily handle your day-to-day life while dealing with more complex mental challenges at the same time.
Creating Lasting Change: Building Habits That Stick
If we want to change and introduce a new behavior into our lives, we can actually use these energy-saving mechanisms to make it easier. We will focus on the small things, not the big ones. Improving your life a little bit is so much better than aiming high and changing nothing. Especially because small changes can add up over months and years.
How to Create a Habit
If you want to make change easier, the best way may not be to force it with willpower but to convince your brain that it’s not so hard. By creating new routines and then turning them into habits. You’re aiming for your wise planner to build that first trail, and then your toddler to help launch the action effortlessly. Let’s say you want to exercise to get fit, a very common goal. The first thing to do is break down this vague goal into clear and distinct actions because the idea is to make the action itself as easy a threshold to cross as possible: so small that it’s manageable and so specific that you don’t have to think too much about it. For example, a tangible and controllable action could be “do ten squats” every morning. So, you can start by trying to create a routine but including clear triggers that the toddler can pick up on later. Remember, a trigger is nothing more than a signal that you always associate with the action. They can be visual pointers like seeing a particular object, such as your workout clothes. Or a certain time of day, or a specific place like a nearby park – or even better, all three combined. The important thing is that you always start doing your action in a specific context. This trigger is the start button that will eventually trigger the action automatically.
So, to establish a habit of working out at home with ten squats to start, you can make sure to always do them with your workout clothes on, in the same place, and at the same time, let’s say in your living room at 8 p.m. Once you have your trigger and your action, all you have to do is repeat them regularly, ideally every day. If you keep at it, they will move from a routine to a habit, from a trail to a highway. Of course, the squats will still require energy from you, but the decision to do them will feel much less like a chore and more like a regular part of your day.
Though it may sound simple, it’s not easy. Many things you want to turn into habits don’t offer as much instant gratification as wasting time on social media. To make your new action easier to repeat and more likely to be picked up by the toddler, try to make it enjoyable. Not necessarily by rewarding yourself after doing it but by making the action or behavior itself more pleasant. Like listening to your favorite podcast exclusively while working out, or doing your taxes while waiting for civilization to load the next round. You need to figure out what works for you.
The Journey of Change
In principle, that’s it. Frustratingly simple, like most things you can do to improve your life. How long it takes for your toddler to take over and establish a habit varies greatly. It depends on the behavior you’re trying to get accustomed to, what kind of person you are, your stress levels, and many other things. It takes anywhere from 15 to 250 days for a new habit to be triggered automatically by its cue. You won’t know how long it will take for you. Starting is the easiest part, especially the first one or two weeks. Keeping up with it every day is the hardest part. But it gets easier as you go on. There’s no magic solution to change. But the science of habits is a reminder that it’s possible, no matter your age. Even if you end up doing a little bit more of the good stuff, or a few new things, it’s still a success. Being a little bit healthier or more knowledgeable is a million times better than being unhappy with one thing and changing nothing.
Conclusion
In the end, change is a direction, not a destination. So now that we hope we’ve given you some insight and motivation, it’s time to sell you something! But know that you don’t need to buy anything to work on yourself. That being said, we struggle with change as much as anyone else, so we’ve created our own Habits Journal, both for ourselves and for you. Before printing anything, we tested it on ourselves and received feedback from the Kurzgesagt team. The idea is for you to track the progress of your desired habits. There’s a tutorial section that guides you step by step through the most challenging part of the process. You’ll get helpful tips, reflect on your progress, and think about how you can make things easier for yourself. Once you’ve completed the tutorial section, the habit journaling begins, regularly interspersed with examples, scientific breaks, and reflections that will hopefully make the journey interesting. Like our Gratitude Journal, it’s bound, with an embossed hardcover and printed on high-quality paper. Pleasant to touch and with plenty of beautiful illustrations, this book is your companion in your journey of personal change, no matter how small or big. Getting things from our shop is the best way to support Kurzgesagt and what we’re trying to do here on the channel. Thank you for reading!
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