Without understanding habit loops, we can tend to blame the world around us for those times when we throw in the towel and give up on our healthy habits. If: my partner didn’t bring pizza home; my kids were better behaved; my boss wasn’t such a jerk; my mother didn’t get on my nerves; I didn’t have so much work to do.
We often think that the resulting stress, or sadness, or anger or even joy, make us eat or stay up late watching TV or crave sugar, or sleep in, or skip our morning walk.
Anatomy of a Habit Loop
So, let’s look at the anatomy of a habit loop and what really leads us away from our healthy behaviours.
James Clear, in his book Atomic Habits, describes the habit loop in 4 steps:
- Trigger or Cue – The thing that kicks off the whole process.
- Craving or Urge – Wanting a reward of some sort
- Response or Action – Getting the reward
- Reward – The reward itself that then reinforces the loop.
In a non-health example, the habit of picking up our phone in response to notifications might look like this:
- Trigger – Your phone chimes with a notification
- Craving or Urge – You want to see what’s on your phone
- Response or Action – You grab your phone. You throw in the towel on resisting the urge.
- Reward – You get to see what arrived. At best, it’s a funny joke or good news. At worst, it gives us relief from the craving or urge.
What Really Leads to Throwing in the Towel
Notice that it’s not the actual chime on the phone that causes us to grab the phone and read the message. It’s the urge to see what’s on the phone that drives us to respond. This is why habits are individual. For some, that little notification ding doesn’t bother them in the least. For others, it’s painful to not see what it’s all about. This is also why it’s not our circumstances that prevent us from adopting healthier habits. It’s our response to those circumstances.
Now all of this is not completely conscious. That’s why sometimes we find ourselves sitting with an empty bag of cookies that we just downed wondering how we got here. Our brain’s job is to put everything it can into a habit loop so that we can use our brain for other things. Imagine if you had to consciously think about every step to brush your teeth, have a shower, get dressed, drive your car? You would be mentally exhausted by the time you really started your day. Once something is a habit, your brain’s job is to make it subtle, to make it feel like you had no choice.
Habit Loops and "Stress Eating"
So, let’s look at a common example I see in my clients: What they call “Stress eating”.
- Cue or trigger: After a long day at work, you walk in the door tired and overwhelmed. Perhaps You’ve thoughts all day of “I’ll never get this all done. There is too much to do.” with a side of “I should be able to keep up. I’m not good enough.”
- Craving or Urge: You think “Those cookies would be good right now.” Or “I need to eat something, so I don’t feel stressed”.I want X so that I don’t feel Y.
- Response or Action: You grab the cookies. We throw in the towel.
- Reward: You get that dopamine hit from the sugar plus you’ve distracted yourself from all those thoughts that made you tired and stressed.
It’s not the stressful day that leads us to the moment we grab the cookies. It’s the urge for the cookies. Not everyone turns to food when they’re stressed.
Using Habit Loops for Good
There will always be things in our lives that have the potential to cause stress. Your child is up sick all night and you have an important presentation the next day; that boss of yours dumps a big assignment on you with a short deadline and you don’t have the time; the dog barfs on the shoes you planned to wear today and you’re already late for work; you had a fight with your partner, AGAIN, about the division of labour in your household.
However, these are just part of the cue. It’s the urge or craving we have in response to those cues that is the real culprit, and this is good news. It means that we don’t need to change our boss, our kids, our dog or our partner in order to break a habit loop.
So, how do we leverage this knowledge to break the cycle and stop throwing in the towel? There are several strategies but as James Clear describes it, you want to
- Eliminate the cue
- Make the craving unattractive
- Make the action difficult
- Make it unsatisfying
I’m going to go into each of these in the next blog post so stay tuned and we’ll discuss how to tackle each of these.
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