How To Make Lasting Change In Your Life

Welcome to the first official post of the Bi-weekly Monday Digest!

In today's article, we talk about:

• What are habits and how they work.

• What makes breaking habits hard.

• Six steps to help you make lasting change.

This article is based on insights from The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg & Atomic Habits by James Clear. I'll be sharing a more detailed summary soon so feel free to subscribe if you haven't already and I'll send you a PDF version of my notes once it's ready.

How To Make Lasting Change In Your Life

For most of us change doesn't come easy. Nonetheless, with every new start of the week, month and year, comes this feeling of hope that CHANGE IS POSSIBLE. We make resolutions and start the year with a new lease on life. We try to wake up earlier, exercise more (or at all), read one book a month, tone down on impulse buying and eat less junk food. However, in as much as we know how good all that is for us, with time, the motivation dies down and one by one, the daily routine crumbles and it's back to business as usual where snoozing that alarm, or binge-watching that series is so much easier!

So how do we make change that lasts?

For change to occur, awareness is key. Thus, for us to understand how to change our behaviour (aka habits), we first need to understand how habits work.

You cannot change that which you do not understand.

So What Are Habits & How Do They Work?

A habit is a recurrent, often unconscious pattern of behavior that is acquired through frequent repetition.

Over 40% of the functions we perform today as human beings are habits; walking, tying shoelaces, driving, brushing our teeth, our morning/evening routine etc. We no longer think about how to do these tasks, we just do, which brings us to Charles Duhigg's (author of The Power of Habit) definition of habits;

Habits are the choices that all of us deliberately make at some point then stop thinking about but continue doing often everyday.

Which means that, when we were learning how to walk, tie our shoelaces, drive, brush our teeth, we made active decisions on which shoelace to tie first, or whether to put on the safety belt or switch on the car first when learning how to drive. Activities that once occupied our mind have now become behaviours that take place without a single thought aka a habit. WE DON'T THINK, WE JUST DO.

For a task to eventually become a habit, it needs 3 key elements:

1. A cue

2. A routine

3. A reward

If you look at all the habits you have, they can all be broken down into these 3 key elements as shown below:

The same cue can trigger different behaviours in different people depending on what reward they are seeking. And eventually the continued repetition of this habit introduces a fourth element and the key habit driver: A CRAVING

In the beginning, there was no craving. You woke up (cue) and made a conscious decision to distract yourself by picking up your phone (response/routine). But with time, the constant reward/high that comes with picking up your phone introduces a craving. And now, you wake up and crave a distraction hence you pick up your phone. It's no longer a conscious decision, but a desire as seen in the image above. The cue is now associated with the 'high' hence the habit loop advances from loop A) to loop B).

• Immediately you wake up, you now crave a sense of preparedness and so you meditate.

• The minute you feel stressed you now crave a sense of brief relief and so you smoke.

This explains why habits are so powerful and often times hard to break. They create neurological cravings that emerge gradually hence we're not really aware they exist, making us blind to their influence.

This is the cycle that drives human behaviour, with the craving as the key driver. (see image below)

Now that we know how habits work, we can deconstruct what makes up our habits and identify how to facilitate change.

Here are 6 simple steps to help you break bad habits and make lasting change.

In the next article, I will focus on each of the 6 steps mentioned above and share a template with examples on how to apply the steps outlined.

I hope this article comes at a time when you need it!

If you enjoyed this read, feel free to share it via social media (icons above) or forward it to a friend.

Until next time, have a lovely week.

#ChooseToThrive

Update: You can read part 2 of the #HabitSeries here