Are Your Habits Holding You Back?

We’re in our fifth month of Coronavirus now, and nothing is the same.

Now is a good time to check in before things get too far out of control. All indications are that many societal changes will be sticking with us for the foreseeable future, so it’s a good time to assess where we are now and think about where we want to be heading. What are our “good” habits that have fallen by the wayside? What are the “bad” habits that we have picked up during the quarantine?

Back in March, when you still had some hope that the quarantine would only last a couple of weeks, you may have figured that you would work out again when the gym re-opened. Now it hardly matters how fit you are—everything you wear has an elastic waistband and no one sees your bottom half anyway!

Remember when you would drive home from work, change clothes, and go to the gym before kicking back? Now you can go for a run in the middle of the day and at 5:01 be cracking open that bottle of chardonnay. And now you find yourself a frequent visitor to the BevMo pick-up line…

What are the ways we can escape these traps and make our habits work for us instead?

1. Mindfulness

Many therapists both practice mindfulness and promote it to their clients.

Mindfulness meditation has been shown to reduce stress and improve mood; it’s hard to find a reason not to develop a mindfulness practice! If you have trouble sitting still long enough to meditate, you can still develop a practice of mindfulness by picking one regularly recurring activity (e.g. brushing your teeth, making coffee in the morning, or washing the dishes) and practicing keeping your mind focused directly on the sensations of that activity. If your mind wanders, just bring it back to the activity again. The more your mind wanders, the more you get to practice returning to mindfulness!

Building a mindfulness practice will make all of the subsequent steps much easier, so keep up with your meditation or your mindful activity throughout your period of habit change. If you struggle to stick to your mindfulness practice, then maybe this is the first habit you want to try to build!

2. Awareness

Keep a journal or a note on your phone where you track whatever habit you are trying to change. Studies have shown that just tracking your habits will make a significant difference in your ability to change them.

3. The Habit Loop: Stimulus—Behavior—Reward.

Ultimately you want to experience the stimulus, have a different behavior, and experience the same reward. It’s straight from Psych 101, but it’s not easy! The trick is to be extremely clear on exactly what the stimulus is, and what the reward is. If you don’t pinpoint these correctly, you won’t be able to change the habit.

Stimulus

First pinpoint if your stimulus is based on time, location, emotion, a specific event, or another person.

In your habit journal, each time you start the habit, record the time, the location, the feeling, what happened just before, and what people were involved.

After a week or so, look at your journal to see which stimulus is constant. If you feel the craving to eat a doughnut every morning at around 10:00am no matter what else in the scenario is different, then the time is the trigger. If you start thinking about happy hour whenever the kids start yelling at each other, then that’s the preceding event that triggers the craving.

Reward

Now determine what the reward is for this habit. You can do this by experimenting with different routines that deliver different rewards.

Is your reward for the doughnut the energy that comes from the sugar rush? Is it the break you get from work when you stop to go to the kitchen? Is it the connection you get with your partner who is working on the kitchen table? Is it the game you play on your phone while you are eating the doughnut?

Try eating something different that will also deliver the sugar rush, like a glass of orange juice or a banana. Try taking a break to read the news. Try talking to a friend or taking a short break with your partner in the living room. Try playing a game on your phone from your desk or a room other than the kitchen. Notice which one of these alternative behaviors is satisfying; that will tell you which reward is important to you.

How do you know if it’s satisfying?

Each time after you test a new behavior, immediately jot down the first three things that come into your head. Then set an alarm for 15 minutes later. When the alarm rings, note down whether or not you still have the original craving. Later you can assess patterns—the 3 words will help you remember your state of mind—and the existence or absence of the craving will tell you if you got the reward already.

4. Your New Habit

We know that it is extremely difficult to eliminate a habit; that it is much easier to replace it with another, more desirable habit instead. Once you have all your information, you can create a new habit that will give you the intended reward.

5. One Last Thing–Plan for Trouble!

Studies show that if you brainstorm possible obstacles, and then create a plan to overcome them should they arise, you are significantly more likely to be successful.

It is important to remember as therapists that our clients can have habits that involve not only their behavior, but also their ways of thinking and feeling. Time and time again I have seen clients get stuck in obsessive thoughts or feelings out of pure habit. Habit re-training can make all the difference!

NB: Although stimulus-response-reward is a common idea in psychology, the “habit loop” and ways to use it are specifically explained by Charles Duhigg in his excellent book, The Power of Habit.

Amy McManus, LMFT, helps anxious young adults build healthy new relationships with themselves and others after a breakup. Amy’s blog, “Life Hacks,” offers practical tips for thriving in today’s crazy plugged-in world. Learn more about Amy from her website www.thrivetherapyla.com.