I do a lot of things on a regular basis that people might classify as “good habits.” I go for a walk every morning. I hit the gym nearly every day. I prep my meals on the weekends so I always have something healthy to eat for lunch.
Psychologists define “habits” as things we do automatically in a specific situation. “For example, the act of hair twirling may eventually occur without the individual’s conscious awareness,” reads the definition from the American Psychological Association.
Going to the gym
Reading books
Getting to bed on time
What we really want is behavior change
Psychologists have a different term for things like eating healthy, getting more sleep, and reading a book instead of doomscrolling social media. They call it "behavior change," and there are countless studies and theoretical models exploring how people actually end up changing their behaviors.
Precontemplation: You are not interested in doing the thing (let’s say: going to the gym).
Preparation: You’re taking steps toward doing the thing. This is where you visit your neighborhood gym for a tour, or buy a pair of running shoes. Maybe you try a workout or two, but you’re not committed yet.
Maintenance: This is you once you’ve finally built the “habit.” Like maintaining a car or a relationship, keeping up a habit takes work. Things will turn up that disrupt the habit; you might take a vacation, or get injured, or get discouraged in your progress. While you’re in this stage, you need to learn to anticipate and deal with those potential problems in order for the behavior change to stick.
A lot goes into even the behaviors that seem straightforward. For example, if you want to eat more fruit, you could set out a fruit bowl. But that’s not the beginning or the end of it. You need to know what fruits you like. You need to buy them regularly. You need to know how to shop for them, avoiding the berries that are about to turn moldy and the bananas that are so underripe they’ll still be green for days. (It would also help to know that the berries will last longer if you store them in the fridge, and that you can buy green and yellow bananas in the same shopping trip so you have a week’s worth of perfectly ripe fruits.)
Here's what I mean. The best book I’ve ever read on becoming a runner is not one that centers around hacks like stacking your running habit with walking your dog. It’s The Non-Runner’s Marathon Trainer, which at first sounds like it will offer a training program. But of the book’s 300 pages, the training plan only takes up half a page (the bottom half of page two, to be exact).
Other chapters explain why you want to buy sweat-wicking clothes, how to prevent bloody nipples, how fast to run, what to tell yourself when you get tired and want to quit, how to recognize common injuries, how to track your weekly mileage, why you should increase your carbohydrate intake and what foods will help you do that, how to set appropriate goals, what to pack in your bag on race day, and how to get through the pre-race taper without losing your mind.
It’s okay to work for (and enjoy) your habits
The classic habit hacks tend to assume that habits are boring and we have to trick ourselves into doing them. Maybe that’s true for flossing our teeth, but anything we truly want to do, we do because we enjoy it, or at least appreciate the benefits that come with it.
When we love a thing, we stick with it. When we feel something is drudgery, we look for excuses to get out of it. In fact, Donald Edmonson, a scientist who researches behavior change, has pointed out that we make long-term changes by taking ourselves off of autopilot.
Habit hacks still have their place
Each of them can backfire if and when they fail, so think that through. If you temptation-bundle your favorite TV show with your treadmill time, one day you might just sit down on the couch and watch it anyway. If you meditate every day so you can get a streak on your calendar, you might just say “fuck it” and quit meditating entirely after losing a 364-day streak. If the only thing powering your habit is tricking yourself into it, you’ll never really reach that crucial maintenance stage. Little hacks can’t power big changes.
But habit hacks do work well for simple, low-stakes items, or for smaller pieces of a larger goal. It can be helpful to think of them as reminders rather than motivation. Stacking is great for building a bedtime routine (or a morning routine, or a pre-gym routine), but that is only part of the larger behavior-change habit you’re really aiming for (“go to bed on time”). When you’re building your habits, you have to think big before you think small.
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