Some people run four miles per day and eat salads, while others watch 5 hours of television and eat popcorn. Some people study two hours per evening, while others play two hours of video games. Some people perform chores every week, while others buy new clothes for a year straight instead of doing laundry. What is going on here, and how can you form better habits for a more fulfilling existence?
There are two primary issues here: happiness and fulfillment are different feelings, and habits that trigger your dopamine are different from habits that improve your life. This is what we’re going to cover in the blog post today, but before we get into that, we have to summarize what a habit is and some of the best, most digestible points from work on the subject.
So, what is a habit? A habit is a specific pattern of behavior that you perform repeatedly in a specific way over a period of time. Positive examples include waking up at a certain time (everyone sleeps, but not everyone sleeps and wakes up at the same time), exercising three times per week, or brushing your teeth every day. Negative examples include smoking, biting your nails, or eating too much dessert on bad days. In either case, you are exhibiting a consistent behavior over time indicative of how you see yourself, how you feel, what your circumstances are, and how you approach life. Steven Covey famously pointed out in his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, that there were Personality Ethics that people held to perform activities to achieve goals and Character Ethics to behave in ways associated with the kind of person that they saw themselves as. This is an example of how your beliefs shape your behavior and, therefore, your habits: if you believe that an activity will get you an outcome and you want it, you will do it; if you believe that you are a good person, you will behave in ways consistent with that view.
The two most famous books in recent history on the topic are The Power of Habit and Atomic Habits. The former talked about the fundamental elements of habits: a cue, a routine, and a reward. This is a variation of stimulus->response in psychology but fully explained at how your behavior is either caused by a driving force or a desired result. For example (one that Charles Duhigg uses in the book), if you get hungry in the afternoon, eat a cookie, and feel the sugar high, alertness, and satiation afterwards, you will likely do that again in the future and form a habit over time of eating afternoon cookies. Whether that is a good habit or a bad habit depends on if you consume too many calories and gain weight to the degree that you become either unhealthy or unsatisfied with your life.
In the more recent book, Atomic Habits (which credits The Power of Habit with the foundations), James Clear provides a list of practical, low-effort techniques to manage the four components of the habit that he defines as an expansion of Charles Duhigg’s model: cue->craving->response->reward. The second step is acknowledging that the cue causes you to want to perform the behavior, which causes you to perform the behavior. So, if you get used to eating pizza when you watch football games or drink soda when eating pizza, the cue of the football game might cause you to crave the pizza (or the pizza might cause you to crave a soda) and so that’s what causes you to call for the pizza and soda, which is deliciously caloric. Again, habit are only “bad” if they lead to undesired outcomes, so it is your choice which habits you choose to form or break.
The final introductory point for this post is why habits and the information on how they are formed are important: success in life is a result of what you do every day, not some magical one perfect day that leaves you satisfied for the rest of your life. Long-term goals require consistent work and so you need to form constructive habits to attain them. School is a habit; work is a habit; exercise is a habit; spending time with your children is a habit; practicing a hobby or skill is a habit. You can form habits to watch hours of TV every day or work on your screenplay every day, and only you can decide which one will be ideal for your life satisfaction.
Okay, now for the purpose of this post: what are the best habits for you? Now, I know you’ve probably heard a million times what good habits and bad habits are: eat your vegetables, get enough exercise, read, learn something every day, and get enough sunlight and fresh air; don’t consume to much TV or social media, eat too many unhealthy foods, do drugs, or say too many filler words like “like” or “uhh” when you talk. So it’s not a matter of telling you which habits you should have but rather how you can figure out which ones you want and then promote them.
As for which ones are best for you, we all need certain things for our well-being: sleep, food, water, relationships, shelter, etc. Therefore, you should view habits as to whether they are beneficial, detrimental, or neutral relative to other habits—after all, you can’t eliminate a habit…you can only replace it. As I mentioned, watching two hours of TV is not necessarily a bad habit as long as you do everything else you need to do to survive and thrive with the rest of your time. It’s similar to when a professional defines when an alcohol addiction officially becomes a “problem”: when it interferes with your ability to perform the other functions of your life. So if you watch two hours per day of TV and your bills are paid, it’s not necessarily a problem at all. If you watch two hours of TV and forget to feed your child and he’s starving, then the habit might be a problem at that point.
It’s the cue->routine->reward model that causes life coaches and motivational speakers to tell you about the importance of setting goals. Without a goal, you basically become hedonistic in the sense that your cues and rewards are mostly biological. And, as mentioned at the beginning of the post, what makes you feel good hedonistically is often different from what makes you feel fulfilled. As a result, you might feel good after eating a whole pizza, watching two hours of TV, or drinking three cups of coffee per day, but it might not be leading to long-term fulfillment like switching those habits to balanced meals, taking a cooking class, and sleeping an extra 30 minutes to require less caffeine.
So that’s the biggest takeaway and the reason for this post: a bad habit is usually a low-effort dopamine boost to handle stress or boredom, whereas a good habit is usually a high-effort goal-based (or, as mentioned earlier, character-based) feeling of accomplishment in response to an issue or a plan. But, again, there is possible room for both in a happy, fulfilling life as long as the ones that might not be constructive do not fall into being detrimental. That’s what we’ll cover next.
Because most positive habits require planning, effort, and willpower, it is best if you have means to hold you to them as much as possible and make them as easy as possible. Example: you can set your alarm at 5am every morning, but if you turn it off and sleep until 7, it’s not working. So many people do everything they can to make it easier: going to bed earlier means more sleep and an easier time waking up; putting the alarm out of arm’s reach forces you to get up to turn it off; having a friend meet you at the gym at 5:30 gives you a reason beyond yourself to show up on time and not procrastinate. And, of course, big sources of meaning like winning a Super Bowl, taking care of your children, or waking up early now so you don’t in five years are great motivators to help you exercise the discipline necessary for positive habits.
So the first part of improving your habits is to look at your life, evaluate what you need to do to feel fulfilled, and then mentally plan out how to form habits to accomplish your goals and how to put in place mechanisms to prevent you from slacking off. That is half of the formula to forming the best habits possible.
The second half is to reduce bad habits. This is (ironically) more difficult for several reasons: a bad habit feels good, is low effort, and is usually done for a good reason. Example: often times, people watch TV instead of doing chores because they are tired and the TV gives a dopamine hit while allowing them to relax. It’s not always just laziness (and “laziness” is just a formed habit of not doing much that becomes the status quo). So the only way to break that habit other than sheer willpower of making yourself not do it (e.g., throw away your TV, hide the remote, or set a time on your power strip to not deliver power to your TV during certain times) is to address the circumstances that cause that to be the preferred option: get more sleep, and you’ll be less tired; listen to a podcast while you do chores, and you’ll get the same entertainment while being productive. It’s the ability to change your circumstances so that the habits become less necessary or tempting that allow you to more easily maintain good habits.
Remember that not all habits that aren’t working toward something are necessarily bad. Humans need rest, and your goals in life might be different than other people’s. Some people want to win the Olympics and so need to work tirelessly, whereas others might just want to work a 9-5 job and spend their free time however they feel like spending it. Both are fine—as long as you are happy and fulfilled with your life as a result. It’s when you don’t that it’s a problem; you can go to the bar every Friday and have fun, or you can go to the bar every Friday and Saturday night and begin to feel like it’s pointless. The former is fine; the latter means you need to change your habits.
The most important thing you can do is get to know yourself and what you need to be happy and fulfilled. If you need to feel productive, then you can’t slack off too much or you’ll be miserable. If you like to be active, then you can’t miss your exercise routine or you’ll both be less fit and be missing out on a fulfilling activity. Many people make short-term tradeoffs like cutting out the gym if they have a busy time at work or at home only to find themselves miserable in a couple of months wondering what happened—it might be that you cut out a habit that was helping your emotional state!!!
This works for bad habits as well. If you try to quit smoking cold turkey and then you don’t go outside for 5-minute breaks anymore or don’t have a good way to manage stress, then you might ironically be worse off even though you cut out a bad habit. (yes, no one will admit this because smoking is very unhealthy, but it is an important point) If you were going golfing every weekend to get away from your family for a short period for much-needed alone time, then maybe you could be spending that time working on something else but it won’t make your life much better if you lose the needed alone time. This is why people have “cheat days” when dieting or drink alcohol, gamble, or play video games in moderation: you might need balance to optimize your life.
There is one way to tell if you should just cut something out of your life completely: if it causes you to lose your willpower. Whether it’s social media, gambling, caffeine, TV, or alcohol, if you can’t control yourself while under its influence, you should cut it out completely and find something that you like that you can control. It’s the idea that you can avoid eating cookies in your house as long as you don’t buy them and bring them into your house. It’s not a moral weakness to not be able to resist eating the whole box of cookies if they’re in your pantry; it is, however, your responsibility to not bring them into your house if you know that’s going to happen. Because most people are fine avoiding a bad habit as long as they keep themselves away from it. I speak from personal experience when I say that I can get lost for hours on social media sites because of the infinite scrolling of videos, posts, and photos…but if I never open the app, I can lose the urge to check within a few days and forget they even exist within a few weeks. I replace that time with other habits like reading, exercising, playing video games, or writing. Again, whether a habit is good or bad is up for you to decide, but generally if it prevents you from doing other things and you begin to feel worse overall and need the habit as a crutch, then it’s probably an issue.
Overall, you can form better habits by increasing the triggers to cause you to do them, increase the rewards (or desire for the rewards) for them, or make the habit easier to do. You can get rid of a bad habit by reducing the need for it, reducing the reward for it, or making it harder to do. You decide whether a habit is good, neutral, or bad based on whether it is either helping you be productive overall (i.e., growth-enabling and fulfilling) or it simply helps you to enjoy life and get the most from it (i.e., it makes you happy). You ultimately choose how you spend your life…but if you are not happy, look to your habits. Your habits shape your life.