The Habit Theory That Changed My Life, Explained

what is up and welcome to working hard hardly working for those of you who might not have listened to the podcast before when I started this I wanted it to be all about curating stories from a range of guests but this year we're not just leveling up the guests we're revamping the solo episodes too I have a nerdy obsession with knowing more about random things and theories so I've given myself an excuse to spend hours researching the topics I wish I knew more about let's get into today's topic The Habit theory that changed mine and

probably everyone you've seen on Instagram's life first of all let talk about the context of habit Theory what activities do you do every day without fail you might start thinking of the obvious brushing your teeth drinking water eating lunch maybe you're thinking about the habits that you want to break like checking social media in the evenings or snoozing your alarm whilst these small habits may not seem like they make much of a difference to your day if you want to make a change in your life it is the small daily actions not the big changes

that make a difference habit theory has been around for decades and decades but it's really exploded in recent years most of this can be Pinn to a gamechanging book by James CLE titled Atomic habits you've probably heard of it before in the book James CLE says that your identity is quite literally made up of your actions so you're defined by what you do so if you want to change your identity to say become more successful or productive or to be a better friend it's easy but it's not just a shift in your mindset you need

to distill it into daily actions clea's idea that a lack of clarity is often mistaken for a lack of motivation and that most of the time the reason we fail to reach our goals isn't because because we can't be bothered but because we haven't turned our goals into achievable trackable habits my favorite quote from the book is you do not rise to the level of your goals you fall to the level of your systems goal setting means absolutely nothing if there's no system related to it that will help you actually achieve that goal a goal

is a wish without a system basically there's Decades of science behind clear's Theory so let's get into the actual data Studies have shown that up to 43% of our daily actions are habits so it makes sense that shifting them would have a huge impact on your life the idea behind clear's theory is very simple and the headline is that you've got to focus on shifting your habits so you're getting 1% better every day improving by 1% sometimes isn't even Noti but here's the maths if you can get 1% better each day for one year you'll

end up 37 times better by the time you're done this doesn't sound like a lot however 37 times better is not 37% better it's 3, 700% better because of exponential growth to give an example of this if you started the year with £100 and you were able to increase that by 1% every day by the end of the year you would have £ 3,778 so you wouldn't just have1 plus £365 because of the exponential growth this is how much your life can improve conversely if you get 1% worse each day for one year you'll decline

nearly down to zero so so what starts as a small win or on the other hand a minor setback can actually accumulate into something much much more and this is backed up by business studies too according to a study conducted by the Harvard Business Review companies that integrate small consistent improvements into their daily operations are 30% more likely to see substantial growth over time so it's not just something for your routine but to apply to every element of your life and work start thinking about this every day in everything you're doing whether it is a

skill whether it is a habit I promise you it will change your whole perception there is a lot of psychology behind this and in order to understand it we need to understand the Habit Loop in the 1990s researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology decoded the structure of habits they coined the idea of a habit Loop to describe the neurological patterns that are the basis of all of our routines the loop consists of four parts cue craving response and reward let's go through each stage together number one this is the Q the Q is what

triggers your brain to initiate a habit if you think of your brain like a sniffer dog that's always searching for a dopamine hit the que is its first whiff of reward this could be a primary reward linked to a survival Instinct like food or water or it could be a secondary reward we've evolved to want like money power Fame approval love or satisfaction number two is the craving if your Q is your first hint that you could get a reward the craving is the natural response to that hint James Clear puts it brilliantly when he

says that Cravings are the motivational force behind every habit so without some sort of motivation we wouldn't have any reason to do any action and What We crave isn't the habit but the reward that habit delivers a good example of this is you don't want to switch the light on you want to be able to see in the dark so you're not motivated by turning on the TV but the promise of entertainment once you do your specific thoughts feelings and emotions are what transform a Quee into a craving so if you're a smoker smelling a

cigarette might be a c to light one however if you're not it could be aute to move away because you don't want to smell the smoke number three is your response so the response is the actual habit like the action itself clear points out that whether a response occurs depends on how motivated you are and how much friction is associated with the behavior if a particular action requires more physical or mental effort than you are willing to expend then you won't do it your response also depends on your ability so brushing your teeth might be

easy but if you want put away your shopping in a high cupboard but you're not tall enough then you're more likely not to do it this explains to me why I don't want to go on a run and finally what it was all for the reward the reward is really what makes the Habit Loop go round CLA puts it like this the queue is about noticing the reward the craving is about wanting the reward the response is about obtaining the reward think of your brain as a reward detector it's always monitoring and bookmarking the actions

that give you rewards so that it can repeat them again and again and again and the more immediate that reward the more likely your brain will be to repeat that action so take eating chocolate for an example this is an action that will give most of us an immediate dopamine HP compare that to cooking a long and healthy recipe and you quickly realize why so many of us find it hard to have a balanced diet the psychology of the reward is also why we have tick boxes next to every item in the TPM planner the

more satisfying you can make finishing a task the more likely you are to both do it and repeat it now this is really interesting cuz it explained to me why I feel really when I get to the end of the day if I didn't have a plan or a to-do list for that day in comparison to if the day before I had done exactly the same amount but had had a plan or to-do list we are wired to want that dopamine hit so if we're going to do a task we want to know we've achieved

that task we want to be able to literally tick it off all these four steps in the habit Loop are essential for making or breaking any habit so without the first three steps a behavior will not occur without all four a behavior will not be repeated so once you know about how this system works you can hack it to create the right habits and break the wrong habits that align with the person that you want to be to create a good habit you need to make the queue obvious make the craving attractive make the response

easy and make the reward satisfying and to break a bad habit you need to make the cue invisible make the craving unattractive make the response difficult and make the the reward unsatisfying so I'm going to give an example of both a habit to make and a habit to break if I wanted to make a habit of working out in the morning I would make my queue obvious I would leave out my workout clothes the night before I would make the craving attractive so I would do something to make that workout easier like making sure that

I had a gym membership I was happy with getting myself a peltin if I was feeling super generous or getting myself some nice active wear obviously from Chara you'd make the response easy how are you going to make that work out easy you're going to have a set workout plan you're going to know exactly what you're doing you haven't just left your active wear out you also know today I am doing PTI class 102 and then you make the reward satisfying on a smaller level that is ticking it off on a bigger level that could

be once I've done six weeks of this I'm going to buy myself some headphones like I literally did last week I made the reward satisfying let's talk about the break side so for example say I wanted to break a smoking habit so to make the queue invisible I'm obviously not buying any cigarettes and any I already have I'm getting someone to hide or throw away I'd make the craving unattractive obviously with something like smoking this is hard to explain because the craving is going to be attractive because usually there's an element of addiction behind it

but how about a nicotine pad so you're making the craving less attractive because you're not actually craving it as much because you are getting that hit from elsewhere you're making the response difficult you've already made it relatively Difficult by hiding or throwing away you're not buying any more cigarettes but on top of that maybe you don't go past the shop on the way home where you usually buy cigarettes and you can make the reward unsatisfying by maybe having an accountability partner and you have to tell that person every single time you actually smoke so you

feel letting them down these are just two examples obviously you can apply this to any area of your life in order to make or break the Habit loop as part of these newo episodes I really wanted to talk to The Experts themselves I have a voice note from near AAL who wrote the book that really put habit Theory into the mainstream my name is near a all and I'm a behavioral designer so I help companies build the kind of products that build healthy habits in users lives and I also help people break bad habits like

those associated with distraction so the most surprising thing about habits is just how much of our day-to-day lives are Guided by these behaviors done with little or no conscious thought these habits about half of what you do every day day in and out is is motivated in some part through habit now that's surprising but I would also caution that not every Behavior can become a habit so it's very important to know the difference between a habit and a routine the one thing I wish everyone knew about habits is that not every Behavior can become a

habit when you hear people talking about how they want to create a habit really what they're saying is they don't like doing something and they wish they could have some magic autopilot button to turn it into a habit now that can work with certain behaviors behaviors that meet the very definition of a habit a habit is defined as a behavior done with little or no conscious thought so certain behaviors you can absolutely turn into a habit think about the first time you learned to drive a car when you first learned it was probably white knuckling

it the whole time but as you got more comfortable and that behavior turned to a habit you can have a conversation with someone while you're driving you can listen to an audio recording the radio a podcast all while you're driving out of habit but some behaviors cannot and will never become habits those behaviors we call routines unlike a habit which is a behavior done with little or no conscious thought a routine is just a series of behaviors frequently repeated but for behaviors that will never become habits we need what's called deliberate practice so habits requires

you to do something effortlessly routines require you to do Behavior by leaning into the discomfort by doing something that's difficult that's how you become somebody who can repeat a behavior with a routine the problem is when people get their wires crossed they wake up one day and they say oh this behavior is still hard it's still difficult I still don't like it there's no autopilot here and they think that they did something wrong so they quit all together and so it's really important to understand what behaviors can become habits and which will never become habits

God I find this whole thing so interesting and hearing from him is a real privilege on this so now you know about the theory you can second guess your own habit Loop for example you could turn off your social media notifications to silence your cues to check it 100 times a day or you could allow yourself to watch Netflix once you've stacked your dishwasher making the reward for that habit more satisfying the most useful time to think about your habit Loop is when you're goal setting so let's say you want to do 10,000 steps every

day think about how you can optimize The Habit Loop for that action what's your cue to do it are you going going to walk at a specific time every day how will you make it an Easy Action to do what reward will you give yourself after you've hit that Target these are the systems that I use every time I set a goal because they're science-backed whether that is a goal in business or in my personal life you need to break down every single goal into habits and then track them every day it sounds both overly

simple and also a huge faf but it is literally the basics of achieving anything remember that goal setting episode we did at the beginning of the year say you set these amazing goals you feel really excited about them you've had this dopamine hit because you feel excited about like I'm going to do this this and this this year how great is this going to be next year when I get to this point when I'm like I've done all of these things those goals will never ever ever come true if you have not integrated them into

your everyday if you haven't built a habit Loop based on them so why not look back at the goals you set at that point look at the top three ones and break them into a habit Loop what is going to be your habit Loop for that specific goal then when we're taking that into the kind of atomic habit theory that is when we start to see how important it is not just to have these habit Loops to know how to make and break habits but when we zoom out a little bit more from that how

we make sure that we are getting 1% better every single day it's not as easy as it sounds but it's also not as hard as it sounds 1% 1% better you can do that and the way you can do that is by making sure that the habits you are doing every single day are exactly aligned with with the overall goals you set it's not about setting the goals it's not about the big picture it's about how you break that down into the every day is what's going to determine whether you reach those goals or not

so I hope you really enjoyed learning more about habit Theory I feel like I need a reset on it every few months because when it's at the Forefront of my brain I'm so much more productive and I feel like I'm so much closer to the person I want to be the goals I want to reach I fully believe in goals being wishes until you genuinely have a plan and this this is the theory I can get behind and when I was doing some of my reading on it and just like refreshing to make sure that

I am actually getting 1% better every single day I was just thinking I was like I'm so glad I know about this and I feel like it's the type of thing that everyone sees everywhere everyone sees Atomic habits everyone sees habit Theory and everyone's like yeah but if you don't know about it you should know about it and this is why I wanted to do just like an in-depth explainer so that we can all actually get 1% better every day if you want to do some more reading up on the subject because I've really only

scratched the surface here I've included a reading list in the notes below so that is your Whistle Stop tour and habits Theory let me know how you are going to be implementing it into your life and also please let me know what you think of these new explainer episodes I'm the type of person I don't want to start something or try something if I don't know if it's really going to work but I feel like I listen to explainer episodes on Celebrity drama on like big things that have happened on the news on whatever it

might be and the things I really want to hear about are these things like the life Improvement things I want to know deep dives into things like the beauty myth why we're so obsessed with life Improvement why the world makes women poorer all of these types of things I would love to do Deep dive episodes on let me know if that's the type of thing you would be interested in I wanted to try this new setup by just recording one episode let me know what you think you could tell me you hate it I personally

absolutely loved preparing for this episode and as I said I feel like life Improvement isn't just about the things like habits it's about being a better person by knowing more things about the world and being more interesting and being able to hold better conversation and talk to people about things that aren't just other people and that's why I'm so passionate about this type of thing in case you cannot tell so I hope you really enjoyed this episode if you did please like And subscribe and I will see you in the next one [Music]