How to Build a Habit

I’m doing my DPhil on digital habits and have therefore spent a whole bunch of time reading as much habit research as I can get my hands on. I’m also a legit real boy who lives in the real world. With those two things in mind, let me tell you what I know about building habits. I’m not going to cite all of this because I don’t have time^*. If you want to read a habit review, go and find one. If you want “source: trust me, bro”…you’re in luck.

I’m also only going to be talking about making habits - not breaking them. To be honest, to do that you’ve just got to think of things in reverse. I’ll probably do a separate post on that at some point, but for now, let’s think about my new year’s resolution.

How to Nail your New Year Resolution

It’s early January and you’re fatter than you’d like to be, so you’re going to lose weight the “old-fashioned” way. No drugs for you. Diet and exercise. Like a caveman.

I’ll not cover the diet bit, which I’m led to believe is actually how you go about losing weight. Of course, everything I share should also work for building dietary habits, learning habits, smoking habits - I’m just sharing the toolkit. It’s up to you what you do with it.

Instead, we’re going to be focussing on how to build an exercise habit - let’s say “going to the gym”.

Going to the Gym

A habit is a learned automatic response to a stimulus - you know how you automatically put your seatbelt on when you get in your car, or brush your teeth before you go to bed? You notice how each time you don’t weigh up the pros and cons of doing so - it just feels natural. Like “what you do”. Great. You know what a habit is. How do we make going to the gym “habitual”?

Reduce Complexity

Research says that complex activities are harder to form habits with than simple ones.

“But Matt, going to the gym is a complex activity”.

Sure, but you know what isn’t? Grabbing your water bottle from your nightstand in the morning. Or putting your gym shoes on. What I’m saying: take a complex activity and find a simple part of that task and build a habit around that. This is especially important if the sub-task is the crucial part of the task where you have typically failed.

Often you’ll hear the advice “just go and commit to doing a 10 minute work-out. You can come back if you’re not feeling it after that.” That’s great advice because ultimately people’s friction with exercise tends to be getting started, so if you can use mental tricks to overcome the primary hurdle, good for you!

Any friction might be enough to inhibit your newfound habit so mercilessly strip away friction. Packing your bag in the morning always a drag? Pack it in the evening when you’ve got more motivation. Defrosting the car enough to put you off? Get one of those weird blanket things for your car or park in a garage or something. Gym too far away? Go to a closer one.

Your reptilian brain will find any excuse to not go to the gym, so you need to use your big smart human brain to outfox it. Find any possible blocker and work really hard to remove them. If it introduces friction, it goes.

So now you’ve managed to pare back your gym-going to the absolute bare essentials, we’re going to have to find something to attach the habit to. Introducing Mr Context.

Pick a Context

“I aim to go to the gym twice a week” is bad. Too vague. When specifically are you going to go?

“Monday and Wednesday after work” is good - but be careful. How often does work run late? Is there a time at which you’d decide it’s too late to go to the gym? If your train is cancelled will you still go? If big Jim announces he’s going for drinks, what then?

“Tuesday morning and Saturday evening” might be OK, but a weekday morning and a weekend evening gives me the heebie-jeebies. You’re unlikely to be in the same place and same headspace when you have to decide whether to go to the gym for both of those visits. That lack of contextual stability is a habit-breaker.

Day-of-week and time-of-day aren’t the only ingredients of “context”. Surrounding activities (“I always go to the gym after I go to the office/drop my kid off at their swimming lesson”), involved people (“I always go with my brother”), mood (“when I feel angry”)… whatever lets you become “triggered” and to tie that trigger to a specific behaviour can work. Seat-belt wearing is tied to “getting in a car” (location-based), teeth-brushing is typically tied to waking up (time-based), and hand-washing is typically activity based (going to the toilet).

I’m not here to tell you what context you should try to attach your habit to. But I am here to tell you that “I’ll just work out when I should go each week on a case-by-case basis” isn’t conducive to habit formation.

Do it. Lots.

This is then the grind - behavioural frequency.

It’ll not surprise you to learn that habits aren’t built overnight. You have to do the same thing in the same context again and again. Research isn’t really fully aligned on exactly how many times you have to do something before you “have a habit”. There are weak habits and strong habits and activities of different complexity and all kinds of things that mean a universal rule isn’t really going to be forthcoming.

For now, let’s say that you need to be able to maintain the activity for at least 30 days before it starts to get mentally easier. Probably safer to assume 60 days. Even at this point, there’s no guarantee that going to the gym is going to be an effortless breeze. But it should hopefully start to feel like less of a chore and more just like “what you do”.

Give yourself a Reward

One of the ways you can help build a habit is through rewards. Specifically, when you successfully pair a behaviour with a context, you’d like to immediately signal to your brain that this was a good choice.

Alcohol drinking, gambling and smoking are great at this - you feel stressed, you smoke a cigarette, you get flooded with lovely lovely nicotine. Your brain starts to realise it can cut out the middle-man (conscious thought) and just says “stressed? Pick up that cigarette. No need to involve any rationality.”

What reward can you get for going to the gym? That’s up to you. A bite-sized bit of chocolate probably defeats the point but it’s along the right kind of lines. Maybe swipe about on TikTok a bit and get the dopamine hit that way? Data nerds like me get their rocks off by tracking strength over time or hitting a streak of some sort. Maybe you only get to listen to the harsh nasally laugh of your favourite podcast host when you’re at the gym? Or that’s the only time you’re allowed to watch those grainy concert and firework videos cluttering up your phone? You do you. The point is, to start off with, don’t be afraid to reward your efforts lavishly.

The Result

A habit is a legit real thing - a neural pathway in the brain that cuts out the need for conscious thought and instead turns you into a simple machine that takes an input (a stimulus) and returns an output (a behaviour). You can build them with motivation and work. If you already have motivation and the ability to do work, why build a habit? Think of a habit as an investment into your cognitive future. You’re going to have to invest time and effort now either way. I’m hoping that by reading this, you’ll be a little better positioned to see those efforts offer longer-term benefits - to help build the habits that you want to.

And maybe get to the gym a little bit more, you fat bastard.

^{*And some of the studies were on rats, not people. But that feels more like a you problem than a me problem}