Here we are at the end of another month.

I had my 31st birthday this March, reminding me of so many different things:

I’ve been a legal adult for so long. I’m just a few years short of having been an adult longer than I’ve been a child, regardless of how I feel about my own age. I do not feel like I’ve quite gotten things figured out, but I’ve also grown – and continue to grow – comfortable with that.

I realize that I probably should have taken a before and after of my mustache. It would have been a nice little touch for some personalization here, but alas, this did not happen.

As we enter into springtime, this is as good a time as any to pause and reflect about the things we would like to renew. Perhaps we would like to renew our relationships with certain people, or renew our pursuits of some passion or another. Perhaps we would like to review and reinvigorate certain routines.

This is the approach to this month’s post about Habit Building.

Introduction to Habit Building

My wife recently read through the book Atomic Habits by James Clear.

She has wanted to better form her routines around her goals to make them easier to achieve.

Seeing the title and asking about the topics within the book, she claimed that I did not need to read the book – I already do pretty much everything the book is talking about.

I figure if there is even a tiny piece to learn from it, I would find the time spent reading valuable anyway.

I have not finished reading it just yet, but I figured this could be a good opportunity to provide a projection of the concepts introduced early in the book.

Simplifying the book’s message, there are 4 pieces of habit building that anyone must focus on if they want to build or break a habit:

Cue → Craving → Response → Reward

These four pieces form a linear path in the habit system: The Cue initiates the process, triggering a Craving. The Craving essentially forces the individual to act – the Response – with the anticipation of achieving a Reward.

I’ll use an example from the book to get through this part of the discussion…

The Process of a Habit

The Cue is what initiates an action or behavior.

When you walk into a dark room, you’ve entered an environment that acts as a Cue.

The Craving is what you desire and is prompted by a Cue. 

As a creature that greatly depends on light to see, your entrance into a dark room triggers your desire for light.

The Response is the action or behavior you execute to satisfy that Craving.

Without thinking much about it – if at all – you try to find and use a light switch.

The Reward is the satisfaction of your Craving.

We found the light switch. It was probably within an arm’s length as soon as we crossed the threshold into that dark room. Now that it’s been used, the light is on, and we’re satisfied with these circumstances.

This particular process is over.

The Point of Explaining the Process

At this point in the article, it’s pretty easy to think “well, that’s hardly a habit that was developed to reach a goal, right?” And while it technically is very much a habit developed to consistently reach a goal, the point of this short section is that this is really how simply habits work.

Your environment or circumstance triggers your brain to complete a process to achieve a desired outcome.

“It is dark. I can’t see, but I want to see. I want light. I turned on a light and now I can see.”

Taking it one step further:

“It is dark. Normally, when I am in the dark and want to see, I flip the light switch, which triggers a light that allows me to see, so I’ll look for a light switch to turn on a light.”

Now with that brief description, it ought to be clearer why I make this point…

Trying to Use the Process

So, let’s say we’re trying to build a fitness habit.

I realize it’s no longer January, so the usual window for New Year’s Resolutions is a bit past us, but bear with me.

You are, for the sake of this discussion, trying to build (or let’s even say improve?) a fitness habit.

Your ultimate goal is not necessarily to run a specific distance within a specific time or to lift certain weights during certain exercises. You just want to spend, say, 30 minutes a day, 3 times a week, exercising.

Before reading this article, your idea for building this habit was simply to go to the gym or track on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and get it done.

This goes perfectly on Monday, but on day two of your fitness adventure, you forgot your shoes, or you did not wake up early enough before work, or you did not leave work early enough, or you just don’t really feel like it, or you forgot to eat a meal and don’t have energy, or you didn’t bring clothes to exercise in…

But, on Thursday, you read this post and now you’ve got the tiniest foundation for how a habit is supposed to work, even though there has basically been no nuanced explanation as to how to best influence the development of your own process.

But you know: you need a cue that triggers a craving that prompts a response to achieve that reward.

…maybe it’s easiest to understand what your reward is, first. 

What about exercising would feel satisfying to you?

Maybe it’s seeing weight loss on the scale. Maybe it’s seeing physical changes in your body.

Maybe it’s getting desirable attention from others. Maybe it’s perceived improvements in your strength, flexibility, endurance, or energy levels.

So, if we know what satisfies us, we just need to make sure we have clear cues we can use to develop a craving and response.

If we want our response to be “exercise,” but getting there from any cue seems difficult, it’s possible to start habit development with a 1% solution:

Knowing that we need to be in a certain place or a certain outfit to exercise, we can instead develop a new cue instead of a response. Or, in other words, turn our response to a first cue into a second cue rather than the outright response we want:

“I just woke up. I’ve established this as my cue to want to work out, but it turns out I don’t really want to work out.”

“I made a plan to build a habit, though, so instead of waking up and exercising (i.e. cue → response), I’ll just plan to wake up and put on a fitness playlist. Now, this playlist feels so energetic, it just makes sense (I feel the mildest craving) to do a single push-up or maybe a few jumping jacks to. And now that I’ve done one push-up or one jumping jack, I feel more compelled to do a little bit more…”

In a way, we’ve sort of tricked ourselves into exercising by using a separate cue → craving → response pathway.

Maybe you realize that you can make this entire process easier by changing your morning alarm to that energetic playlist – that’s an easy improvement to your habit-building process.

In a similar vein, if you wanted to break a bad habit, you simply need to make it more difficult:

Do you often get distracted doing some other activity when you are supposed to be doing something else?

Maybe you find yourself binge-watching television.

You could try to go cold turkey, but the television or the remote is always just a short distance away.

Maybe you can remove the batteries from the remote and separate the remote and batteries by a significant distance. Move the batteries into a kitchen cabinet and the remote in a separate room.

Maybe you can set an automatic shutdown timer for your TV, and you put your remote somewhere inconvenient to reach after you set the timer so you don’t immediately disable the timer between episodes.

If you want to build a habit, make the process to get to your response as easy as you can; if you want to break a habit, make the process to get to the usual response as difficult as you can.

That’s the approach from a response perspective, but if Cue is the entry point into the process, perhaps adjusting that would be way more effective:

Is your TV in a high-traffic part of your residence? Could you move it to a side room or cover it with something? Remove it? Perhaps the activity that you actually want to accomplish that is usually disrupted by the presence / watching of your TV could be done in a different space, entirely?

As much as it is within your control, manipulate your environment in ways that amplify (or attenuate) the power of your habit-building/ breaking Cues.

And sure, it’s a cheeky conclusive statement, but: It’s that simple.

One More Thing

Here is a copy of the tables near the end of the book that simplifies developing good habits and breaking bad habits. These are verbatim from the end of Chapter 17 of Atomic Habits.

HOW TO CREATE A GOOD HABIT

The 1st Law	Make it Obvious
1.1	Fill out the Habits Scorecard. Write down your current habits to become aware of them.
1.2	Use implementation intentions: “I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].”
1.3	Use habit stacking: “After I [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].”
1.4	Design your environment. Make the cues of good habits obvious and visible.
The 2nd Law	Make it Attractive
2.1	Use temptation bundling. Pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do.
2.2	Join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.
2.3	Create a motivation ritual. Do something you enjoy immediately before a difficult habit.
The 3rd Law	Make It Easy
3.1	Reduce friction. Decrease the number of steps between you and your good habits.
3.2	Prime the environment. Prepare your environment to make future actions easier.
3.3	Master the decisive moment. Optimize the small choices that deliver outsized impact.
3.4	Use the Two-Minute Rule. Downscale your habits until they can be done in two minutes or less.
3.5	Automate your habits. Invest in technology and one time purchases that lock in future behavior.
The 4th Law	Make It Satisfying
4.1	Use reinforcement. Give yourself an immediate reward when you complete your habit.
4.2	Make “doing nothing” enjoyable. When avoiding a bad habit, design a way to see the benefits.
4.3	Use a habit tracker. Keep track of your habit streak and “don’t break the chain.”
4.4	Never miss twice. When you forget to do a habit, make sure you get back on track immediately.

HOW TO BREAK A BAD HABIT

Inversion of the 1st Law	Make It Invisible
1.5	Reduce exposure. Remove the cues of your bad habits from your environment.
Inversion of the 2nd Law	Make It Unattractive
2.4	Reframe your mindset. Highlight the benefits of avoiding your bad habits.
Inversion of the 3rd Law	Make It Difficult
3.6	Increase friction. Increase the number of steps between you and your bad habits.
3.7	Use a commitment device. Restrict your future choices to the ones that benefit you.
Inversion of the 4th Law	Make it Unsatisfying
4.5	Get an accountability partner. Ask someone to watch your behavior.
4.6	Create a habit contract. Make the costs of your bad habits public and painful.

Conclusion

I highly recommend reading Atomic Habits to get more nuance to this entire idea – it will be a lot more particular about the process of adjusting your processes.

I don’t know about you, but I know I have a lot of goals and aspirations. Developing good habits is critical to achieving my interests, and knowing that there’s pretty much always space for improvement means constantly seeking out even the smallest fraction of a benefit I can get along the way.

And as “simple” as building good habits or breaking bad habits can be, there will of course be challenges – but it can be done.

Thank you for reading my brief spiel on habit building; good luck with April!