Making Sure Habits Are Good Ones

Much of our parenting life is spent trying to help our children develop the predispositions and skills that are likely to allow them to find success and happiness as adults. We want them to be kind, courageous, thoughtful, resilient, hard working, empathetic, and independent. Put most simply, we are working together at home and school to encourage good habits AND to develop the ability to problem solve in novel situations. That simple, that complicated.

 

While it may surprise us, current research increasingly indicates that William James, the renowned psychologist, may have been more right than wrong when he posited that, “All our life so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.” (James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology) Understanding habits, how they form, how they influence our behavior, and how they can be created and changed, may play a much larger role in our children’s success than we ever imagined, particularly if up to 40% of our waking hours are spent performing them, rather than engaging in conscious action. (The Power of Habit, xvi). Habits are composed of a cue (trigger), a routine (emotional or behavioral) and a reward.

 

Seems pretty simple, right? What is unusual, however, is what happens in our brains when we are doing the routine. It is as if our brains shift into low gear. At the beginning of the habit, our brain is aroused, then while we do the behavior, the actions we know so well – brushing our teeth, getting frustrated with neighbor – our brains downshift to autopilot. When we reach the other end of the routine, our brains reengage, almost reawaken. Scientists surmise that the human ability to create and execute habits allows us to conserve energy and create efficiencies while conserving our focus for novel situations. Without this ability, life would be immensely more difficult. Simple tasks like brushing our teeth, combing our hair, eating with flatware or tying our shoes would consume our time and energy.

 

Habits, once established, are astoundingly resistant to change. Research indicates that once formed, a habit is almost impossible to completely extinguish; the trigger remains active and the routine is encoded in the basal ganglia, a portion of our brain near the stem. This is why addiction is so difficult to recover from or why exercising routinely for some feels so out of reach. It is also why only 9% to 20% of New Year’s resolutions to change one habit or another are realized. (Power of Habit, Chapter I and James Clear, Behavioral Psychology, Habits, Self-Improvement) Importantly, understanding how habits work has led to new findings about how old ones can be modified or new ones created. Let’s start with modifying an established habit that is unwanted. Current research indicates that our best bet is to substitute a new routine when confronted with the old trigger. In other words, while we may not be able to eliminate the cue — driving by the golden arches, looking at the pile of work on your desk, whatever it may be — we can work to substitute a new routine or set of behaviors for the unwanted ones. Instead of turning in to the McDonalds and eating less healthy food, we see the arches and eat the snack we prepositioned in the car. Cue followed by new routine. Instead of seeing what homework is due on the CA website and going out to play basketball, we self-consciously sit down and do the first problems and then give ourselves the reward of shooting some hoops.

 

While rarely easy, the research also provides insight into how to create a new habit. This involves creating a cue, executing the behavior and finishing with a reward. In the case of exercise, a cue might be putting your running shoes beside the bed if you plan to run first thing in the morning and having a nice cup of coffee as a reward after finishing. Creating a new habit takes willpower and plenty of consistency and desire. Additional helpful suggestions include starting with attainable goals (half a mile a day, not fifteen) and not trying to make too many changes at once (stop eating meat, exercise every day, and stop watching TV). Of course, the real world is not as simple as these examples suggest, and some habits can be stubborn about bending to our will.

 

Wouldn’t it be great if our basal ganglia had evolved to distinguish between a “good” habit and a “bad” one at the time that it is being created? Even better, if it only allowed those habits to establish that would aid our children and us in finding success; unfortunately, that is not how our brains work. The cue, the routine and the reward come together over time to create a habit, whether it serves or disadvantages us.

 

I hope, though, that knowing the mechanism of habit formation and change allows us to be more self-conscious about our habits and opens a window to modifying those that are least adaptive for our children and ourselves.