Understanding How to Create and Break Habits

One day, you find yourself laying in your bed at 10 AM, mindlessly cycling through your daily dose of YouTube shorts and checking in on your Instagram feed. A few hours pass, and you finally muster the motivation to get out and get some longstanding tasks taken care of. You decide to brew yourself a mug of coffee. You fill up the kettle and begin heating it up, but not before you take out your phone once again and, almost by habit, open up Instagram Shorts and begin scrolling. You sit yourself down in the nearest chair. 5 minutes pass, then 10, then 30. Before you know it, you've wasted another 45 minutes of your day distracted and no closer to getting your practically overflowing to-do list done than when you got up.

This is only one example of how unhealthy habits can compound into big issues if left unattended, for students and non-students alike. I'm a huge fan of books such as Atomic Habits (James Clear) that dissect these facets of human behavior in a way that people, like me, with no professional knowledge of human psychology, can understand and take action against. As an almost two-and-a-half-year old self-improvement hobbyist, I've thrived on my dozens of hours of online research and book reading that have shaped me into the student I am today, but, as you can very well imagine, not many people are as avid as me when it comes to catching up on the latest self-help guru trend.

My goal in this post is to make it easier for the average reader to understand what habits are so that they can redirect their existing behaviors into powerful, habit-based routines that better align with their time management goals. In doing so, I'll provide a run-down of some of the tools that I personally use to keep track of my habits.

“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.” - James Clear

What Are Habits?

Habits are subconscious and involuntary actions that are formed through continuously repeating behavior. In the example at the introduction, your brain has associated idling (having free time) with browsing social media apps. The more often you participate in said behavior, the more likely you'll do it again the next time you find yourself in a similar situation. This is a key characteristic of habits, and one of the main reasons we can find it so hard to break out of that rut.

How Are Habits Formed?

Habits are composed of four primary parts: the cue, craving, response, and reward. The cue is an external or internal factor that signals the initiation of the habit. In the introduction, the cue would be seeing your phone sitting on the nightstand or the water boiling in the kettle. Next, there's the craving. The craving happens almost right after the cue, and is the intrinsic desire or motivation that leads to an action. The craving in the previous example would be a sense of restlessness or boredom. Now, after feeling that boredom, your first instinct is to satisfy it by browsing through Instagram or YouTube. This is the response, which is the action following the craving. As you scroll through Instagram or YT, you're hit with some of that sweet dopamine, which temporarily relieves the boredom. This is the reward.

How Can I Break/Create Habits?

Breaking bad habits can be tough, but by understanding how habits are formed, you can break them down into smaller and more manageable steps.

To break existing habits:

1. Identify your cue, craving, response and reward.

2. Remove the cue. As the first part of any habit and the one that triggers that subconscious switch, alter your environment or routine to reduce the likelihood of the habit starting. Going back to the previous scenario, you might consider charging your phone in a different room overnight to make it less accessible.

3. Increase friction for the response and make it more difficult. This may entail deleting social media apps from your phone or installing an app blocker like AppBlock on IOS or Android, or Freedom for desktop platforms.

4. Reflect on the negative aspects of the habit and make the reward less satisfying. For instance, write the negative consequences of engaging in the habit as well as the long-term benefits of not engaging in it on a piece of paper. Pin this up in the place(s) where the habit usually takes place so you can look at it each time you begin to falter.

5. Replace the habit with a more healthy activity that offers the same reward as the previous habit. Since the reward for viewing social media is a hit of dopamine, one healthy replacement could be exercising, which also releases dopamine and gives you a nice boost of energy.

To create new habits:

1. Identify a possible cue, craving, response and reward.

2. Exemplify the cue and make it as obvious as possible. If I wanted to build a habit to exercise in the morning, I could put my exercise clothes right next to my bed so that I might step on it as I get out of bed.

3. Decrease friction for the response and make it easier. For exercising, I could watch my favorite TV show as I run on the treadmill, or listen to an audiobook as I take a walk around my neighborhood. For larger habits, I can break it down into specific steps, and reward myself for completing each of them. This transitions nicely into the next step.

4. Celebrate wins! Keep a log of your progress in a journal or online habit-tracking tool. I suggest using an app like Habitica for gamifying your habits.

And that's some of the things I learned from Atomic Habits and my personal experiences in harnessing the power of habits. Keep in mind that it's easy to get a "motivation high" and tell yourself that you're going to change your life by adding and breaking a ton of habits in only a week. Though it's great to be optimistic, I recommend you focus on one habit at a time. It's extremely easy to get overwhelmed, especially when adding or removing many elements of your typical routine at once (which I have definitely tried once or twice), so aim to knock each one down individually so you can be consistent with your efforts.