At my last company, there was a manager who usually got up at 4:30am, ran for 2 hours,
and got to work before everyone else.
He was always at the top for sales achievements and worked pretty much like a robot.
At first I just figured he was some sort of superhero, "Batman??"
"It’s not batman!"
However, once I realized that he simply repeated a set of actions over and over again until
it became an automatic habit, it seemed doable even for a mere human like myself.
While difficult, he just needed to establish the routine: Wake up early, resist urge the
to go back to sleep, lace up his shoes instead of checking email, get out the door and run,
resist multiple urges to stop and rest, get back home and take a shower.
After a while, all these willpower expensive actions melted down into a seamless habit.
I have developed a habit too.
One that I've been doing ever since I can remember
in response to stress.
Anytime I’m feeling anxious about something, I unconsciously chew on one of my fingernails.
...Of course this isn’t a habit I wanted to develop or one that I want to keep.
So what is it about habits that makes something like biting your fingernails so hard to stop,
while making something like running a couple half marathons per week possible?
There’s three things to know about why habits develop whether you want them to or not.
The average brain is made up of 40% gray matter and 60% white matter.
White matter lies under the gray matter and is composed of long nerve fibers insulated
by myelin sheaths.
Myelin is the fatty tissue that makes white matter white, and it’s one of the reasons
people can get good at things.
As you repeat an action, the neurons associated with that action will have their axons wrapped
in myelin.
So every time you put in an hour of practice, you earn yourself another wrap of myelin around
the neurons used for that activity.
More myelin means nerve impulses can travel more quickly and efficiently across the axons.
This means the action can be done more easily, skillfully, and will require less concentration.
A bare, un-myelinated neuron will have a signal speed of 2 miles an hour.
The signal speed of a fully myelinated neuron is about 200 miles an hour.
Practice makes perfect because practice makes myelin and myelin makes perfect.
This is one of the key principles in “The Talent Code”.
Author Daniel Coyle explains that most athletes, singers, or musicians that we would normally
refer to as “talented” are actually incredibly diligent individuals.
They have put in hours and hours of practice until their brain was packed full of myelin
associated with their craft.
So in the same way that Alain Martel is very good at billairds, I’ve unfortunately gotten
really good at biting my fingernails to deal with anxious feelings.
It’s a bit of a stretch to compare the two, but I’d argue that our brains are both generally
trying to do the same thing: make things easier.
When I was still a kid, my brain identified biting fingernails as the easiest method for
coping with daily stresses.
Little by little the nerve impulses for the neurons associated with chewing on my fingernails
got so efficient, that the action takes place without me putting any conscious
thought into it.
Alain Martel on the other hand, has put so much concentration into perfecting certain
billiard motions that his brain has dedicated plenty of myelin to ensure this task could
be done incredibly well.
The second thing to know is about willpower.
By the 1980s, the theory that willpower is a learnable skill was generally accepted.
It was understood as something that can be taught the same way kids learn to do math
and say “thank you.”
In the power of Habit, Charles Duhigg talks about how a group of PhD candidates totally
changed our understanding of willpower.
Mark Muraven and other psychology PhD candidates at Case Western started asking questions about
the existing view of willpower.
After all, it didn’t make much sense: if willpower is a learnable skill, how can we
be super diligent some days and end up binge watching a TV show for the majority of other
days?
That would be like forgetting how to ride a bike every other day.
Muraven conducted an experiment where they set out two bowls in a room: One with freshly
baked cookies, and one with radishes.
One group of participants were told they could eat as many cookies as they liked, and another
group could eat the radishes but were told they could not eat any of the cookies.
Afterwards, they gave each group a very difficult puzzle to try and solve.
The group that got to eat cookies merrily tried again and again at cracking the puzzle.
On the other hand, the radish group muttered to themselves and were visibly frustrated,
saying they were “sick of this dumb experiment.”
The conclusion was that the amount of willpower you have is finite, and it’s more like a
muscle: you can tire it out if you work it too hard.
Since the radish eating group expended willpower by resisting the cookies, they had much less
fuel left in their willpower tank to use on solving the puzzle.
Another experiment was conducted where participants had to do a four-month money management program.
This required them to keep detailed logs and deny themselves luxuries like eating out or
going to the movies.
What they found was that “People’s finances improved as they progressed through the program.
More surprising, they also smoked fewer cigarettes and drank less alcohol and caffeine...
They ate less junk food and were more productive at work and school.
... As people strengthened their willpower muscles in one part of their lives—in the
gym, or a money management program—that strength spilled over into what they ate or
how hard they worked.
Once willpower became stronger, it touched everything.”
The third thing to know is about your built in autopilot.
In the 1990’s a neurologist named Ann Graybiel figured out a way to get sensors into rats
skulls to measure what was going on inside.
After she got over 100 sensors in their heads she put the rats into a very simple T-Shaped
maze.
At the tip of the T was a rat, partitioned off from the other side of the T which had
a piece of chocolate.
Along with an audible click, the partition would be pulled away and the rat was allowed
to go searching for the chocolate.
On the first couple times through the maze, the rat moved very slowly, scratching at the
walls, sniffing around, until it found the piece of chocolate.
After running through the maze many many times however, the rat would immediately go down
the T, turn left and get the chocolate.
Here’s what brain activity looks like for the first time, and here’s what it looks
like the 150th time.
The first time shows the brain lighting up when the rat scratches or sniffs at something.
After having repeated the “get chocolate” cycle multiple times however, the rat’s
brain nearly falls asleep while looking for the chocolate and then wakes up when it gets
it.
What Graybiel demonstrated was that “a task-bracket or “chunking” pattern of neuronal activity
emerges when a habit is formed, wherein neurons activate when a habitual task is initiated,
show little activity during the task, and reactivate when the task is completed.”
What this means is that your brain is taking series of actions and grouping them down into
a single task, making the process require much less conscious effort.
The part of the brain responsible for this is the basal ganglia.
It was really interesting to read about this while watching my niece try to walk.
She deliberately puts her arms in the air to balance herself as she stands up, slowly
lifts one knee up while shifting her weight, puts her foot down a little bit in front of
her, then repeats with the other leg.
It’s all done with very careful deliberation.
Obviously for us there’s absolutely no thought put into walking.
My niece still has to concentrate to perform such a basic task because her basal ganglia
is still working on “chunking” that action.
This can apply to much more complex things like the entire set of actions that make your
commute to work possible.
Everything from putting your foot in your shoes and tying them to getting in your car,
putting your seatbelt on and so forth until you’re actually sitting in your office chair.
Chunking can make all the actions leading to completing a workout at the gym easier
to do, but it can also apply to all the actions associated with putting yourself on the couch
with netflix and beer.
The other part of Graybiel’s discovery is that habits need a cue to kick your brain
into autopiloting the task.
For the rat, its cue was the click sound it heard as the partition opened up.
For my diligent colleague who ran every morning, the cue was probably his alarm going off.
When I’m writing, I have a habit of suddenly opening up a new tab and typing in reddit.com
. It happens so fast now that the page has already loaded by the time I think “Hey
wait this isn’t what I wanted to do...”
The cue for this particular behavior is finding myself stuck on the phrasing for a sentence.
Habit cues can be pretty much anything from feeling bored or irritated to the clock striking
3:00.
So that’s the behind the scenes on building habits, but now what?
How do you actually build the habit?
You can probably find all kinds of tools and tricks, but for me at least, they usually
just get in the way.
I tried a bunch of habit tracking apps until I realized it was just making the process
harder as I had to also make the new habit of remembering to track my other habits.
Utilizing cues however, has proven to be very important.
You can use new cues to create new habits, or use old cues replace bad habits with good
ones.
For example: New Habit - Meditating for 20 minutes.
Cue - finishing brushing my teeth.
OR Bad Habit - Wasting time on reddit.
Cue - feeling “stuck” on my writing.
So I keep the cue but replace the bad habit with standing up and walking around for 2
minutes.
If you have a bad habit of say buying a cookie every time you finish lunch, replace the action
with buying a cup of tea instead.
If you want to make the new habit of studying every night, make sure it comes right after
something, like finishing dinner or finishing showering
Being consistent with your cue is particularly important.
A little while ago, I decided I was going to write at least 2000 words every day, but
I never got it done consistently because I just worked on it whenever I had extra time.
Then, I finally paired writing 1000 words with the cue of finishing my morning exercise
and the other 1000 words with the cue of finishing my afternoon meal.
Once the cue is set, just... do it.
And then do it again.
All you really need is the right cue and the right mindset when building the habit.
Carol Dweck, professor of Psychology at Stanford, analyzed 2 groups of kids struggling with
their grades.
One group was taught that every time they “push out of their comfort zone to learn
something new and difficult, the neurons in their brain [would] form new, stronger connections,
and over time they [would] get smarter.”
The kids who were not taught this growth mindset lesson “continued to show declining grades,
but those who were taught this lesson showed a sharp rebound in their grades.”
Carol says this kind of improvement has been shown with thousands and thousands of kids,
especially struggling students.”
Once I adopted this kind of growth mindset towards building habits, habit building started
to actually feel ...fun.
As Carol puts it, I used to be “gripped in the tyranny of now,” and not able to
appreciate the “power of yet.”
Once I understood why and how habits form, I gained the confidence that things would
get easier if I persisted.
This confidence made it easy to consistently get a workout done first thing in the morning
- a habit I had been meaning to make since forever.
Every morning, it became a little bit easier to get out of my warm bed and lace up my shoes
rather than scrolling around on my phone.
Of course when I was actually running, my legs would still hurt and I would have the
urge stop and take a rest, but the next time always took a little bit less willpower to
keep going.
So while you’re going about your day, just remember that whatever you’re doing -whether
it’s watching cat videos or learning guitar, your brain is making it just a little bit
easier for to keep doing that.
I wanna say thanks to Mark Mortensen for the support and for getting me to explore this
topic.
If you like this, make sure to check out my other videos and stick around because I’ll
have more out soon.