Start A Good Habit Using The Habit Loop

How To Build A Good Habit (Using The Habit Loop)

Starting a new good habit can be really, really difficult. Especially, if you’re trying to replace it with a bad habit.

But as hard as it can be, and as fruitless as it may seem when you ‘mess’ up day after day, it is possible.

An example of a good habit could be taking your vitamins daily or doing your morning stretches every day.

An example of a bad habit may be late night snacking or scrolling on social media for hours.

Initially, the action may be intentional. For example, you might need to set an alarm to remind yourself to do your morning stretches.

But over time, you kind of just do them without really thinking about it. That’s when it becomes a habit.

Therefore, habits are things you do without really thinking about it.

Building good habits can honestly transform your life as you start to do things on auto-pilot.

Which means you can start hitting all your personal goals easily and with less effort.

How does a habit form?

There are four parts to habit formation: cue, craving, response, reward. This is called the habit loop.

Here’s a quick breakdown of what each stage means.

Cue

Your mind is constantly looking for things in your surroundings that refer to a possible reward. A cue is something that your mind connects to a reward. The reward could be something like comfort, money or relaxation. This triggers the beginning of a new behaviour being formed.

Scenario: You don’t feel like starting your assignment and you’re just sitting there when you notice your phone (the phone is the cue).

Craving

The craving stage makes you want to act so that you can change your internal state.

For example, you crave junk food because of the relief it gives or, you might crave your bed because it makes you feel comforted and relaxed.

Scenario: You want to enjoy yourself before you start the assignment by scrolling on social media (the feeling of being entertained is the craving)

Response

The response may be an internal thought or a physical action. The responds depends on how motivated you are to change your internal state as well as how difficult it will be to do it. If it requires too much effort, you probably won’t do it.

The response you have is what becomes the habit.

Scenario: You scroll on social media for a while (scrolling is the response)

Reward

The reward is the desired change in internal state.

Scenario: You are entertained, and that brings you happiness

Now that you know the four steps in the habit loop, here’s how you can use each step to form positive habits.

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How to form a good habit with the habit loop

Change your environment (Cue)

The cue is the stage in which your brain looks for things in your surroundings that are linked to a reward. So, the best way to ensure that you don’t form a bad habit is to remove things from your environment that will create bad habits.

This may include your phone at certain times of the day and not keeping junk food at home.

To get into a good habit, you do the opposite. You want to put things in the environment that give you positive rewards that are good and healthy for you. This could be making sure your fruit bowl is always full, or keeping your skin care out on the counter so it is easy to reach.

A lot of people like to take their gym clothes out before they sleep so that when they wake up in the morning and see it, they are prepared to go to the gym.

Putting specific things out in your environment (e.g. gym clothes, books, vitamins) so that they are easily noticed and accessible will make it easier for you to start a positive habit.

Your environment really plays a vital role in this ‘cue’ process. You might even choose to avoid certain places if you know that it can trigger bad behaviours.

Understand who you want to become and how you want to feel (Craving)

The craving stage is the part where you want to change the way you’re feeling.

This is why you binge watch a show (for relaxation), emotional eat (for comfort), work out (to relieve stress) or drink loads of water (to feel good that you are taking care of your body).

It is these feelings that you crave for. That’s why you do the action/ response (binge watch the show, drink water etc.)

Let’s say for example that you eat a lot of unhealthy snacks when you’re feeling low. But that is usually triggered whenever you mess up your – let’s be honest, unrealistic – diet. You feel like you completely messed up so you snack to feel better.

Or maybe a certain situation makes you emotional eat. Stress at work, an unsupportive friend, poor self-esteem?

Think about the root reason that makes you do this bad habit, and then think about how you can tackle that.

If it’s stress at work, could you speak to your manager about your workload? If it’s poor self-esteem, could working on your mental health by attending counselling or therapy help you with your emotional eating? Or, if its to do with dieting, what if you just got rid of this whole diet idea and started eating good, filling, healthy meals that didn’t leave you starving at the end of the day?

If you can stamp out the root cause of the bad habit, you’re at the beginning of replacing it with a positive habit.

You no longer need to emotional eat because you’ve dealt with the issue that was making you do it. You feel strong, confident and feel in control of yourself again. Now you want to really work on your health and make sure you hit all your nutritional goals. You could then start working on the habit of meal prepping which not only saves time but ensures that you know exactly what you’re putting in your body.

So, to work on this ‘craving’ stage, really do some soul searching and find out the triggers behind your cravings.

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Make bad habits look ‘unattractive’ (Response)

The response is when the habit formation happens – this is when you take the action whether it is mental or physical.

This is why you need to make good habits look more ‘attractive’ and bad habits ‘unattractive.’

This means making a positive habit easier to notice, easier to do and easier to get rewards from, and doing the opposite for negative habits.

Let’s use popping your spots/ pimples as an example here (I really choose the most random habits, don’t I?)

To make it harder to respond to the craving of popping a pimple when you see it on your face, you could try avoiding the mirror when you are procrastinating so that you don’t think about the spots on your face as much.

If having clear skin is something you wish to have, really focus on that too. Focus on the great feeling you would have of having clear skin.

Maybe, even think about how popping your spots in the past only led to more inflammation, redness and scarring, and this should hopefully deter you from popping your spots.

Remember, this is a process, and is not something you should expect to happen overnight. Habits take time to form, and as a lot of it is to do with your internal feelings, you need to work on that as well on your discipline.

Make the reward really good (Reward)

When forming a good habit, make the reward of the good habit better than the reward of the bad habit (if possible).

Getting your assignment done sooner rather than later stops you from procrastinating and stressing over it for weeks. It also prevents you from having to do an extremely stressful all-nighter. As a result, working on the assignment early relieves stress and gives you more time to relax.

You could also pair the reward with another reward – you could use all that time you have from doing the assignment early to plan a girl’s night with your friends.

Other things to consider when forming new habits

Don’t expect a sudden transformation

All good things take time. While I believe that building good habits is key to transforming your life positively, it takes time to form these habits.

So be patient and work on the habit every day even if you miss it one day or several days.

As well as this, don’t try to add or change too many habits at once in your daily routine.

You are trying to teach your brain to do this specific action almost automatically. So as with all training, it takes time and requires focus, effort and dedication.

Don’t give up if you’ve missed a day or two

If you miss a day of working on your habit (e.g. going to the gym), don’t give up. Get back to it the next day, and over time your consistency and discipline will improve.

Ideally, it would be best to get back to working on the habit after missing only one day but even if it’s been a few days or a week, just get back to it!

Over time, the number of days you miss will decrease as you get more disciplined. So don’t give up – show up!

Limit multi-tasking

When working on the positive habit, try to avoid multi-tasking and put your sole attention on working on that habit.

However, if the habit doesn’t require as much brain energy (like doing your daily 5-minute journal or working on a project), multi-tasking might actually encourage you to do the new habit more.

Saving a specific Youtube video from your favourite channel to watch while you do your skin care will make you excited to do your skin care even more. It doubles up on the reward aspect of the habit.

Habit stacking

Another great way to form a positive habit is to habit stack. This is like an implementation intention but instead, the new habit is paired with an old habit.

E.g.

After I read, I will do five minutes of journaling

After I have breakfast, I will change into my gym clothes

By pairing new habits with already existing ones, it gets easier to work on the new habit as the old habit triggers you to do the new one.

Scale down the habit to a few minutes

If you’re finding it really difficult to form a new habit, see how much of it you can do in just a few minutes.

Scale down the habit of tidying your house to seeing how much you can tidy in just five minutes.

Chances are once you begin you’ll continue going and even if you don’t, it’s better than nothing!

This 5 minute action will be the beginning of forming the new habit of tidying the house for longer periods of time.

KEY TAKEAWAYS – Start A Good Habit Using The Habit Loop

There are four parts to habit formation: cue, craving, response, reward. This is called the habit loop.
The best way to ensure that you don’t form a bad habit is to remove things from your environment that will lead you to doing bad habit.
Putting specific things out in your environment (e.g. gym clothes, books, vitamins) so that they are easily noticed and accessible will make it easier for you to start a good habit.
Think about who you want to be. What kind of things you want to be involved in. How you want to feel all the time. Then think of positive habits you want to have that will allow you to achieve those feelings.
Make good habits look more ‘attractive’ and bad habits ‘unattractive.’
When forming a positive habit, make the reward of the positive habit better than the reward of a negative habit (if possible).
Don’t try to add or change too many habits at once in your daily routine.
If you miss a day of working on your habit (e.g. going to the gym), don’t give up. Get back to it the next day, and over time your consistency and discipline will improve.
Another great way to form a positive habit is to habit stack. This is like an implementation intention but instead, the new habit is paired with an old habit.
If you’re finding it really difficult to form a new habit, see how much of it you can do in just a few minutes.

Start A Good Habit Using The Habit Loop