Now exactly one year ago, I set out to break what for me, was a bad habit: I wanted to
stop using social media so much.
I felt like I was addicted to late night scrolling, early morning scrolling, any time of day scrolling,
really.
It was my preferred method of procrastination, limiting my ability to focus and was kind
of a huge waste of time.
Who gets to the end of the year and thinks, I’m so glad I spent 500 hours on Instagram!
So, I installed this new app called Moment to track my usage – surely knowing I was
wasting so much time would help…
But it really didn’t.
I saved about 15 minutes a day and instead, just felt horrible and guilty whenever I was
using my phone.
This lead to a spiral of “What’s wrong with me” and “why can’t I do it” until
I saw this:
“Myth: A lack of willpower is to blame for our bad habits
Myth: Apps can help us change our behavior.”
Everything I thought about habits… was wrong.
If you type “habits” into your search bar, you’ll quickly find How to Break All
Your Bad Habits, How to Break Up With Bad Habits (In Three Steps) and How to Overcome
Distraction.
But outside of this habit clickbait, some scientists believe that we may never unlearn
a habit, that forming and breaking habits is a pretty slow process and has less to do
with willpower than you might think.
I hope you’re watching this channel for a healthy dose of realism!
Though you shouldn’t always get life advice from Google, so I called an expert to talk
about my bad habits.
Wendy: Most phone apps are not constructed at this
point to help us form new habits…
So phone apps help you with planning.
They help you with scheduling, they help you with clarifying your goals.
All of that is great, but they won't form habits, habit, habits form through repetition
in a particular context.
This is Professor Wendy Wood, who wrote that myth busting article and is a legit habits
expert.
She explains a habit as
Wendy: mental shortcuts that we form because we repeat
a behavior often enough.
Her research suggests that habits make up way more of our everyday behaviour than you
probably realise.
Wendy: What we found is that 43% of the time people
are repeating what they did in the past in a given context and usually thinking about
something else other than what they're doing.
So they're sort of on autopilot
So habits aren’t just a bad thing like smoking cigarettes or a good thing like going for
a run – they’re the infrastructure of our behaviour: everything from squeezing a
tube of toothpaste to stirring our coffee to tying our shoelaces.
Almost half of your actions are essentially scripted – which is why habits are so hard
to make or break.
Habits are governed by non-conscious processes in your brain – most of the time you’re
not even aware you’re performing a habit.
Because these behaviours are part of our unconscious, they’re automatic processes in our brain
that don’t follow the same logic as conscious thought and decision making.
Though we often attribute our actions to decision-making and willpower because these are processes
that we are consciously aware of.
We think we can decide to start exercising in the new year, and our willpower will see
us through.
But this is an example of the introspection illusion – when we believe that we have
direct insight into the origins of our behaviors, emotions and mental states when often we don’t.
To truly influence habits, you need to pay attention to what are called contextual cues
– they’re one of three things you need to form a habit.
Contextual cues can be your environment, like if you’re inside a KFC, a state you’re
experiencing, like hunger or stress, or even a time of day, like when you wake up in the
morning.
These cues lead to a Response, like you reaching for your phone – and a Reward, like the
enjoyment of looking at your friends’ faces on Instagram.
This simple description was coined the “habit loop” by the journalist Charles Duhigg.
And by repeating a behaviour over and over – from two months to even nine months – a
habit memory is formed.
The action becomes habitual, automatic and you don’t really think about it.
And some researchers believe you don’t unlearn habit memories.
So to stop these behaviours, you have to tweak something in this cycle – like the contextual
cue or the response.
Wendy: One of the best ways to change and unwanted
habit is to change the context so it's not activated anymore.
Now our days are full of contextual cues, sitting on the couch and reaching for chips.
So pay attention to them if you want to change bad habits!
You could put healthy food or good reading material in those contexts, within easy reach.
Breaking and forming habits works best when we make things as easy as possible.
Wendy: So a data analytics company tracked thousands
of cell phones for several months to see how far they went to these paid fitness centers
or gyms.
And what they found is that if the phones are the people holding them, obviously went
to a gym that was about 3.6 miles away.
They went five times a month.
Whereas if they went over five miles, aware, they only went once a month.
reduce the friction of that distance, you'll be more likely to repeat the behavior often
enough so that it becomes a habit.
When we fail to form new habits – keep a new years resolution – or break bad habits,
we often blame ourselves for not having enough willpower or drive.
But, remember!
Habits are governed by non-conscious processes in our brain.
They’re automatic behaviours, and it takes a lot to change them.
But, is it possible, by paying attention to your environment, thinking about what is causing
your current behaviour, and finding easy ways for you to repeat new behaviours.
And sometimes the reward is so great that we can’t change our behaviours entirely
– I love using this little colourful internet machine, so I’ve installed a bunch of useful
apps – like Duolingo and Kindle – so I can learn while I’m scrolling.
And I certainly feel a lot better about it.