The Power of Tiny Habits

You’ve probably heard people say, “Our habits make us who we are”. Has that ever made you wonder what exactly are habits from a scientific perspective? And how can you harness the power of habits to build a lifestyle that you truly aspire to have?

Highlights

• Habits are behaviors that are repetitive and originate from our brain’s basal ganglia and are reinforced by the reward system. Habits that are unhealthy persist because they provide immediate rewards. 

• To get out of the unhealthy habits and build healthy habits, it starts with self-awareness of your habit triggers and cues and then to manipulate your environment to remove the cues that aren’t great for you and to add cues for desired habits.

• Focus on building habits one at a time by building it into your existing routine. It starts with small iternations of the new habits and building up slowly over time to maintain the healthy change.

• Cultivating habits that reduce motivation burnouts, build confidence through small successes and allow habits to convert into major lifestyle changes over the long run. It might seem hard to begin with but patience and sticking to routine with tiny habit changes can redesign your life sustainably.

So let’s dive into what Habits are

If you go by definition, habit is a behavior or routine that has become automatic through frequent repetition and when you try out a new habit, it requires conscious effort and discipline. But, the good part is the more you repeat it, the more it becomes ingrained, eventually converting as a habit in your brain’s neural pathways. 

If you like taking the scientific route, habits form through the process of context-dependent repetition. When you repeatedly perform the same behavior in the same context (like location, preceding events, emotional state etc..), a dedicated neural pathway forms in your brain and over time, the firing of this circuit becomes more efficient, so the behavior requires less cognitive effort and becomes a part of your lifestyle.

Have you wondered how our brain perceives habits?

Our brains evolved to form habits for one key reason - to preserve energy and cognitive resources for more important tasks.By delegating routine behaviors to the realm of habits, our brains don't have to consciously calculate every single behavior throughout the day. 

In a research conducted by MIT, it has been found that habits originate in the brain’s basal ganglia and are reinforced through a reward system of the prefrontal cortex. Each habit is initiated by a cue and concludes with a reward, creating a neurological feedback loop. 

When you repeat this cue-routine-reward cycle enough times, your basal ganglia encodes this sequence into an automated habit “program”. This essentially will free up your prefrontal cortex’s higher cognitive resources for more demanding tasks. 

This evolutionary adaptation sometimes works against us when habits are unhealthy or misaligned to our goals. Unhealthy habits like eating junk food, smoking, or excessive social media usage become so deeply ingrained into our neurological programs that it ends up overriding our good intentions.

Here’s what Psychology has to say about Habits

From a psychological perspective habits form through the principles of operant conditioning, a theory pioneered by B.F Skinner. According to this framework, behaviors are more likely to be repeated and become habitual when followed by reinforcement or rewards. 

For example - when you initially force yourself to go to the gym and if this behavior triggers the reward of a dopamine rush and the feeling of accomplishment, you are more likely to repeat it, eventually converting the behavior into a habit. 

Habits that are not so healthy are reinforced in the short-term, which is why they persist even when we know they are harmful to our well-being. For example, scrolling on Instagram before going to bed or on the toilet (💩), even when you know that it may harm the quality of sleep. Social media apps are designed to give you an immediate dopamine boost, leading to automated behaviors such as opening such apps without even realizing it (yep, happens to the best of us!).

However, the prefrontal cortex and our higher cognitive processes can consciously override habits once we become aware of them and the cues that trigger them. This is why knowing how to build healthy habits is so powerful for reshaping our lifestyles.

Here’s what can help you cultivate Good habits

We have understood how habits work scientifically and psychologically, so now let’s look at practical strategies that can help break unhealthy habits and build more positive and healthy ones that align with your ideal lifestyle

1. Awareness

Start to notice when you perform your routine behaviors on autopilot, and take a closer look at the cues that trigger the behaviors. This is the first step to gaining control over your habits.

Once you identify the trigger like the location or a preceding event or your emotional state or something else, start looking at what circumstances or inner experiences are setting the habitual reactions.

Becoming self-aware is crucial, as it can aid in changing habits - you can start a habit journal to track and document your observations about your daily routines and patterns

2. Leverage cue manipulation

Once you have identified the cues, you can reshape the cues and content to disrupt unhealthy habits.

Start by removing the cues that initiate the unhealthy habits. Apply the principle of out of sight out of mind! For example, if you have a problem with eating unhealthy - remove those unhealthy snacks from your pantry and your grocery list.

To reinforce healthy habits, add new cues to your environment and routine. If you want to build a reading habit, you can leave a book and bookmarks in obvious places where you will see it as cues.

3. Build one habit at a time

It can be tempting to want to overhaul multiple habits at once, this is one of the reasons why you feel overwhelmed or burned out. Habits are hard to change because the neural pathways reinforcing them are deeply engraved.

The best way to go about it is to focus all your energy on one specific habit that you want to build or change. Give this habit your full attention for a couple of weeks without trying to change anything else.

Once that habit is firmly engraved in your neural pathways, you can move on to the next one. Tracking habits one by one ensures that you are progressively rewiring your brain’s habit patterns without stretching yourself too thin.

4. Use habit stacking

An effective way of building new habits is to stack them onto an existing healthy habit that you already have. This allows you to piggyback the new routine onto the already existing ingrained behavior pattern.

For example - If you are habitual to making coffee each morning, you could stack a 5-minute meditation habit onto the existing coffee routine or you can start doing pushups before your morning shower.

By linking your new desired habits to the old ones, you create a logical chain that makes it easier for you to practice. The existing habitual cue triggers the new routine as well.

5. Make it tiny!

One of the major reasons why new habits fail is when you take on too much too soon. When we get really motivated and ambitious, we bite off more than we can chew and that becomes very hard to handle, leading to the habit fizzling out. 

A more sustainable approach is to start with the tiniest possible iteration of your habit that makes it easier to not say no. For example, drinking one glass of water each morning after waking up or meditating for 60 seconds after you wake up. Start at a ridiculously small point. 

Once you see you’ve consistently put that tiny habit into practice for a few weeks, you can gradually increase the intensity. 

Don’t underestimate the power of starting small - it allows you to build motivation and discipline in a manageable way. 

6. Institute rewards

Our habit behavior is strongly driven by the rewards or positive reinforcement we experience as a result. That is why it is wise to implement a reward system for your new habits.

The rewards could be something tangible like having a small treat after going for your daily walk or something intangible like watching a fun video of cats after a meditation session. Remember to do it right after you complete the habit. The dopamine release needs to be timed correctly to convert that behavior into a habit!

You can even consider an app that will let you gamify your habits, gaining points or unlocking new levels to help you stick to your routine. Rewiring your neural reward pathways will help cement habits in your brain.

Here’s why you should cultivate tiny habits to aid a lifestyle change

As humans, we are taught to aim for the stars, but when designing habits, research shows that most of the lasting lifestyle changes stem from cultivating tiny habits first, and here is why -

• Tiny habits reduce motivation depletion: Big changes require immense willpower and motivation that most of us find hard to sustain for long. Tiny habits, on the other hand, are easy to start and stick to even on those low-willpower days.

• Tiny habits can build confidence - Starting small and gaining success in doing it instills confidence, which will give you the push to stick to the changes and succeed.

• Tiny habits are deceptively powerful - You shouldn’t underestimate the compounding impact that small tiny habits can create over weeks, months, or even years. For eg: if you start with two pushups a day in a year you would have done 700!

“A study by Dr. BJ Fogg, founder of the behavior design lab at Stanford, found that flossing just one tooth per day helped people eventually floss all their teeth each night. Shrinking the habits to something tiny allowed them to build the foundation to making bigger changes.”

Even though it might seem insignificant at first, if you consistently stick to them, it creates momentum that snowballs into major lifestyle transformations over time!

To sum up

Building a lifestyle you aspire to have isn’t just about constant struggle or willpower alone, rather it comes down to the habits you diligently cultivate over time.

Habits both healthy and unhealthy are ingrained neurologically and psychologically which is driven by the cues, routines, and rewards cycle.

To change a particular habit or introduce a new one it is necessary to start small. Manipulate the cues and contexts around unhealthy habits to disrupt them, while redesigning cues to initiate positive replacement habits.

Try and focus on one new habit at a time and stack it onto an existing habitual routine to help sustain the change over the long term. These tiny habits compound to reshaping your lifestyle in the most gradual and sustainable way.

Before you know it these changes will have a positive impact on your daily routine that will help you in living your ideal lifestyle.

If you would like to try a gamified way of habit tracking and make changes to your lifestyle try out our app urth by trst health.

References

1. What Does It Really Take to Build a New Habit?

2. What It Really Takes to Make a Healthy Habit Stick

3. Operant Conditioning – PMC.