We’ve all been there. We know what we need to do but we’re just not doing it. We go to the gym once or twice but then life gets in the way. We want to start eating better but find ourselves going for the mac and cheese over the salad at lunch. 

Yet we see other people who make it seem easy to eat healthy and workout daily. What’s their secret? Why is it seemingly easy for them and so challenging for us? Are they the chosen darlings of health? No. They are not better, smarter, more advanced humans. No. The answer is habits. 

Getting enough sleep, meditating, drinking more water, eating more vegetables, exercising, taking vitamins and supplements. These are all conscious decisions right? Well, yes and no. They are at first, but when they become habits, they don’t require any decisions.

There are so many healthy habits that we know will be good for us over the long term so why don’t we just do them?  And how long does it really take to create a habit? Maybe you’ve heard 21 days, 6 weeks or 3 months. I’ve been looking into this and I’ll share all my findings on the most recent research. 

In this episode I’m going to tell you about what the habit cycle is and how you can use it to work with your brain to get yourself to do the things you’re currently struggling with. You’ll learn exactly what you need to do to create a new habit easily and how to break the ones that are getting in the way of your weight loss efforts. 

Okay, let’s get started. 

If you’ve ever been frustrated with yourself for not doing what you planned, I want to talk to you about how to change that.

Whether it’s a big thing like writing a novel or a small thing like drinking an extra glass of water a day, it’s all predicated on habits. 

Habits are what differentiates those who are seemingly winning at life and those who seem to be struggling at achieving what they say they want. If this is you, don’t feel bad at all.

Habits are like that nice guy in high school who made a great friend but who we’d never consider dating. But as long as we nurtured the friendship, he was always there for us when the super hot guy, (willpower if you’re into this metaphor) let us down. 

Most people think it’s all about willpower and discipline. If only you had more willpower and were more disciplined, you could stick with it right? But the studies on this show that willpower works in the short term only. It doesn’t help us create long term habits.

Long term habits are created with the habit cycle consisting of Cues, Routine and Rewards.

Essentially a cue triggers the routine and then the brain is rewarded. Let’s go into each in more detail. 

Cues

Cues act as prompts for a sequence of thought, feeling and action to occur. They usually fall into one of five categories:

1. Location

2. Time

3. Emotional State

4. Other People

5. Immediately preceding action

Think of something like having popcorn at the movies. There are a number of cues that would trigger a sequence in which the end result is you eating popcorn.

There’s the location, the movie theatre in which you can smell the popcorn. The time, it’s likely afternoon or evening. You’re not likely at an 8am movie. 

Your emotional state is overall positive. You’re feeling excited or your’re relaxed but you’re not usually in an extreme emotional state in which you wouldn't eat. So your emotional state is conducive to snacking.

You may be with friends or family who are also having popcorn. That would be a huge prompt right? Or maybe you’re by yourself but you see other people buying popcorn.

And the immediate preceding action is walking through the food and beverage section in which you can easily purchase the popcorn. In fact you’re forced to walk by it to get to your movie. 

So if you’ve ever said to yourself you wouldn’t get popcorn at the movies and then found yourself with a jumbo bag with extra butter, hopefully now you can appreciate how that habit was formed. Look at how many cues there are for you to dodge to avoid it. 

But the good thing about cues is that we can use them to our advantage. 

Drinking more water was something I always groaned about...I know it’s healthy, but man - it’s really not that interesting when you’re not thirsty. I had a bad habit of eating when I was probably just thirsty. Of course I only realized that once I started drinking more water and not feeling false cravings for food all the time.

I’ve learned to recognize the cue, which was often an emotional state of boredom at work. My routine was snacking and the reward was feeling satiated and being mildly entertained by food. 

After making a goal to drink at least 10 glasses a day, I use this cue of boredom as a trigger for drinking a glass or 2 of water. It worked because I was still get the reward of feeling satiated (because I wasn’t even truly hungry in the first place) and was getting the benefits of drinking all this water. 

You can also use current habits as cues to develop new habits which is called stacking.

My dog Huxley is almost 14 years old now and for the last, I dunno 10 years, he’s had separation anxiety which meant he would howl and tear up the front door. Both by scratching at it and by slobbering all over the door and hardwood floor. It was pretty gross. He slobbered so much on the door hinge that it rusted through and the door fell off. 

Finally, we hired a trainer to come over and help us. Part of the treatment plan was getting Huxley used to being in the apartment by himself for just a couple of minutes and then gradually increasing the time.  

Turns out dog trainers know a lot about behavior change. Who could have guessed.

She said that it would be a very long, slow process so the key to sticking with the program would be to incorporate it into our current routine, our daily habits.

So for us that meant brushing our teeth out in the hallway of our apartment building while Huxley got used to being calm in there by himself for 2 minutes. Luckily I used an electric toothbrush so we could time it accurately. 

We stacked the habit of training Huxley with brushing our teeth at night, something we were already doing routinely. 

So when it comes to weight loss this can look like paring food prep with catching up with your girlfriend on the phone  or listening to podcasts. Or if you’re trying to drink more water, have a glass every time you enter your apartment. 

So cues and stacking are helpful for starting a new behavior. But it takes more than one or two times for a new behavior to become a habit. We need to develop a new routine. Which is the next part I’ll talk about.

Routine

The key to creating a routine is making your new behavior as friction-less as possible. Friction is anything that adds more decision making or effort in the way of completing the task.

I worked in digital marketing previously and we use a term called friction when it comes to form completion. For example, if you want someone to opt into something by completely the form, the more questions you have or the more steps the person has to take to submit the form increases the friction. If you have to put in your name, your email, your address and the name of your kindergarten teacher and what feels like a thousand other questions, you’re likely to abandon the form entirely.

This is why so many companies allow you to sign up through Facebook or Google now. Literally one click - the least amount of friction. Even entering your name, email and creating a password is too much friction for us. 

This is how Netflix gets you to binge watch easily with the way the next episode starts 9 seconds after the last. There is zero friction in letting it play so we end up watching 4 episodes of the goop lab in a row. 

So when it comes to creating a routine, how can we use this knowledge about ourselves? We need to decrease the amount of friction around the habits we want and increase them around the habits we want to break. 

I’ll give you an example. Say you want to get into the routine of exercising after work. 

What are the friction points and how can we solve for them. 

1. Getting there. Distance to the location. According to Habit researcher and Psychologist Wendy Wood, studies have shown that people who live within 3.5 miles from the gym tended to go on average, 5 times a month and those who lived just 2 miles further away, so 5 miles, only went once a month. So proximity of your gym or workout space to your work or home is important. 

2. Having your gear ready to go. So there’s going to be friction in packing up your workout clothes, your shoes and everything. You can take away this friction by bulk packing this stuff either the night before or have 5 sets ready for each day of the week.

3. Mental resistance. Going to the gym for an hour or even 30 mins can feel like way too much both physically and mentally after a long day at the office. How do we solve for that? By reducing the mental drama. We need to make the whole experience easy at first. So instead of committing to 30 mins or an hour, commit to what feels easy for you. Maybe that’s 20 mins, 15 min or 10 mins. Now if you commit to 10 mins of being at the gym, you’re brain is going to immediately tell you that won’t make a difference right? Like it will take you longer to get there and change than your actual workout . But that doesn’t matter right now. What matters is the habit. If you tell yourself, you only have to do 10mins, there’s less mental resistance because that feels way more appealing than 30 mins. 

In my last job, there was a gym in the basement and I wanted to workout there during my lunch break because that would mean I could get more sleep and have my evenings free. But when noon rolled around, especially in the beginning, I never felt like going down there. I was hungry and just wanted to relax and take a break. So sometimes I would literally tell myself, I’m only going down for the habit creation, not the workout.Maybe I might not even work out - only stretch.  But most times, once I got warmed up I had a really great workout. The hardest part is just getting yourself there and once you’ve mastered that, you’re set. 

When we remove as much friction as possible, it increases the likelihood that we will do it.

It turns out the brain loves familiarity. It’s programmed to recognize patterns and every time we go through a habit cycle, our brains are being reinforced with that same routine and reward over and over again. What’s so fascinating is that it’s using the part of our brain that is AUTOMATIC which is why are habits (even the bad ones, especially the bad ones!...) feel like our default setting and are so hard to break.

On the flip side, when you do establish a good habit, even if it’s painful, like going to the gym after work when you’d rather just head home, it will FEEL easier (because it’s automatic for the brain). I chatted about this once with a personal trainer who said that the people who work out the most at the gym actually require the least amount of discipline to get there. 

And how does all of this relate to breaking habits?

This same researcher conducted a study in which they gave half of the participants fresh popcorn at the movies and half were given stale popcorn which has been popped a week before and kept in a plastic bag. So you can imagine it must have been pretty bad. 

When asked afterwards, all participants who ate the stale popcorn complained that it was terrible. But she found that those who regularly ate popcorn in their diet or at the movies, ate 70% more than those here didn’t usually eat it. This is really interesting, and shows just how automatic these things are. Likely the regular eaters would have a bite, think it didn’t taste great, but were so habituated toward eating popcorn, they just continued doing it anyway. 

However, when she increased the friction by making the popcorn eaters use their less dominant hand, the amount of popcorn eaten between the two groups was equal. It seems that if there’s just enough friction in place for us to have to pause and think, if there is even a small amount of more decision making and effort required, it’s enough to disrupt the pattern. 

So think of something you want to stop doing. How can you increase the friction. A good example of this is not keeping sweets on hand. It means you have to get up and go to the store to have something. I knew of a woman who wanted to reduce the amount of ice cream she was eating. She started slowly by simply committing to putting it in a bowl rather than eating from the container. Just that simple act alone, reduced how much she was eating. 

Rewards

Lastly, let’s talk about Rewards. The last part of the habit cycle.

The reward is the benefit our brain gets from the behavior. If the reward is too far off in the future, it doesn’t help to establish a habit. It must be immediate. For instance, if you plan to reward yourself with a massage or a new outfit at the end of the month or week if you stick to your plan, it usually never works. Why? Because our brains aren’t getting the dopamine hit when it needs it - when it’s hard.

The key here is to pair instant rewards as close as possible and to start identifying and amplifying the rewards from your healthy behaviors. 

I’ll explain. Okay, pairing your rewards. When I was training extra hard before my wedding, I was in a really good habit of going to the gym during the week but on Sat. I wasn’t going. My brain could easily find excuses for not going. I was tired or it was too much time and effort to go all the way downtown. So I started booking an activity right after the workout class so that I would get an instant reward and I figured I had to go downtown anyways so I might as well get my class in first. So I booked coffee dates with friends, a massage or a pedicure, something like that. Something fun that I could look forward to. That was truly a reward for me. 

But another option is to identify and amplify the reward thoughts and feelings we experience when we engage in a healthy behavior. This could be a simple as noticing how exhilarated and alive your body feels halfway through your workout. Or how refreshing your post workout shower is. Help your brain remember all of these great rewards so the next time you think of your upcoming workout, your brain also serves up those reward memories. 

And when you do this, the healthy habits in and of themselves become pleasure inducing and rewards in and of themselves. You don’t need to create or pair them. For instance, it's easy for you to get in the habit of eating more vegetables when you like the taste and how they make you feel. Enjoying the vegetables is the reward. This is how behavior becomes automatic and becomes a habit. 

How long does it take to develop a habit? Habits are associations between context and behavior so the more consistent you have this mental association and the simpler the habit is, the faster it will take. 

For example, having an extra glass of water might take 1 month. Going to the gym is more complex so could take 4 months. 

So. I invite you to think about the habitual patterns you have. What is an area of your life that you want to improve? What behaviors are embedded in this aspect of your life that you might simply be doing as a habit?

Most likely some small, easy changes can literally change your brain patterns and make getting what you want in this realm of your life much, much easier.

Identify the cues and start replacing those less desirable routines with something better; something that will still give you the reward you’re seeking.

You might be amazed when you really examine your daily schedule at how much of your behaviour is on autopilot and how the capacity to which your brain can, by default, help you improve. 

Here’s a quick review before I wrap up:

The cue triggers the routine and then the brain is rewarded. Cues are prompts for a sequence of thoughts, feelings and actions to occur. They can be:

• Location

• Time

• Emotional State

• Other People

• Immediately preceding action

Cues give us insight into why we have our current habits and we can use them to our advantage by creating a positively cued environment and stacking habits in which we combine the new habit with one we are already doing.

This overtime, develops into a routine. Routines are created more easily when there is less friction. Which is anything that requires more decision making and more effort. So again, knowing this we can plan for it and create an environment with less friction. 

Habits are endure because the brain is rewarded. If you’re starting a new habit that doesn’t yet have as much intrinsic reward for you, you might want to pair it with something that does immediately afterward until in and of itself the behavior is rewarding. The vegetables taste good. 

There is a ton of information on habits out there and I encourage you to explore it. I hope I was able to explain my understanding in a way that you can apply to your weight loss journey. 

Thanks for listening. 

Talk to you next week.