As promised, I’m back with Part 2 of this intro to taking control of your habits.

It’s February, so if you’re the New Year’s Resolutions type you probably spent the last few weeks taking a look at your habits and identifying a couple of areas for improvement. I admit I love a resolution and self-improvement in general, and I have spent the better part of my life trying to hack my habits and perfect my environment. (Who else has an ongoing decluttering project? Maybe I’ll write a post about that soon 😂)

Habits are difficult to change, and what works for one problem or one person may not work for another. Today I’ll outline a framework that you can use to experiment with, taking into consideration what you know about your own lifestyle and what you’ve learned from past self-experimentation. This is kind of a long post, but it contains a lot of actionable information if you are trying to implement some better habits.

There are many habit researchers, but I’ll carry on with Charles Duhig here since I started with his framework in my last blog post.

His framework for replacing a bad habit with a more desirable one is as follows:

1. Identify the routine
2. Experiment with rewards
3. Isolate the cue
4. Have a plan

You may remember the Habit Loop from my last habits post. The Cue triggers the Routine which results in some sort of Reward. If you want to break a bad habit, you need to figure out each component of your particular habit loop and replace them with a new routine.

I have an insane sweet tooth and have been trying for years to reduce the amount of sugar I eat, so I’ll use that as an example. I work in a kitchen and one of the first things I do each day is bake cookies, pastries, muffins, and cakes, so my environment is very tempting, especially when I arrive to work starving.

• So the Routine I’m trying to break is “starting my day with freshly baked sugary treats.”
• There are a couple of Cues that frequently trip me up, including “arriving to work starving” and “the smell of the delicious treats”.
• The Reward is “satisfying my hunger with a delicious treat”.

The Reward

The first step is to experiment with rewards. I do know from experience that this particular reward is very short-lived. This kind of food doesn’t sustain my hunger for very long, but even worse, it results in a sugar crash that makes me insanely tired and unmotivated to do any work. Productivity is very important to me and I really hate that feeling of extreme tiredness, especially when I’m already tired since it’s so early in the morning! I also know that starting my day with a sugar rush has a cascading effect that leads to more sugar consumption throughout the day. So finding a way to incorporate that knowledge into my plan will probably be helpful. The Reward is satisfying an unknown craving, so experimenting with the Reward might help me narrow down the specific craving from a list of possibilities.

This particular Reward has a few elements: satisfying hunger, tasty sweetness, a burst of energy, and momentarily reducing emotional stress. So I can adjust my routine each day when the craving strikes to deliver only one of these rewards. It’s important to isolate each reward so you can pinpoint which one is responsible for the craving. One day I could eat a bowl of cottage cheese to satisfy my hunger. On another day I can eat a bowl of fruit for something tasty and sweet. On the 3rd day, I’ll find a private place to do 10 jumping jacks for a burst of energy. On the final day, I’ll do 3 minutes of belly breathing to reduce my stress. After completing each activity, I’ll write down 3 words as to how I’m feeling in the moment. I’ll also set a 15-minute timer to check back in with myself and see if the craving truly feels satisfied. Using the cottage cheese example, if after 15 minutes I still have a craving for a pastry, I’ll know that hunger is not the reason for the craving. Write all of these notes down so you can refer to them later. Once you have this information and the reason for the craving, you can move on to figuring out the Cue.

The Cue

Each day, we are bombarded with so much external noise that affects the choices we make. Charles Duhig has distilled this noise down into 5 categories:

Location, Time, Emotional state, Other people, and Immediately preceding action.

When you are trying to determine the Cue that triggers the Routine, take notes on each of these categories. Write them down in your experimentation notebook. My notes would look something like this:

• Location: Work kitchen
• Time: 6:30 AM
• Emotional state: Bored, hungry
• Other people: Alone
• Immediately preceding action: just pulled my favorite pastries from the oven

Continue taking notes until you start to see a pattern that might lead you to your Cue.

The Plan

Once you’ve figured out the components of your habit loop, you can design a plan to try to create a new, more desirable habit. The formula should look like:

When I see a CUE, I will do ROUTINE, in order to get a REWARD.

I know that I let myself get too hungry and then grab the closest, easiest, and yummiest snack I can find, which is a pastry. So my new plan will be: When I start to feel hungry, I will eat another easy and more satisfying snack (cottage cheese or hardboiled egg), in order to satisfy my hunger. I know that these items need to be just as quick and easy PLUS I need to not let my hunger get to the point of being ravenous, when I start making bad decisions. So I will have these items ready to go, already portioned in my fridge. If I start to get bored with these items, I can come up with a couple of others (carrots and hummus, fruit cup, string cheese, etc.) that still satisfy the desired new routine.

It is not easy to change a habit, but doing the work of experimentation to see what works best for you, and taking really good notes will definitely give you some information to work with as you try to develop new habits that are more in line with your health goals.