07 Apr Hacking Habits (Part 1)
Early on in my clinical practice, I noticed that many of my patients readily and naturally made choices that were in their own interest and for their own benefit, while others moved slowly and reluctantly, if at all, towards meeting their own health objectives. Some of my patients were highly motivated, with clear direction fixed firmly in their minds. With only a little coaching to acquire necessary knowledge and skills, they gained choice, made changes, and then sustained those changes faithfully without my having to stay involved.
For other patients, however, making a commitment to change induced great inertia.
I thought this was an interesting difference, and I set out to understand it. What I found was that in either case, the same basic behavioral patterns were in place, but they were producing very different results! The real difference was how people were using them.
Understanding how habits get made is a necessary step to creating alternatives to existing habits that work better in support of your health goals.
In other words, a good set of skills for facilitating habit change is essential to hacking poor habits for better ones.
We Are Creatures of Habit
Have you ever had the experience of driving to work, but when you arrive you have no actual recollection of driving? This speaks to our remarkable ability to automatically suspend thought when we already know what to do, when, where, and how to do it. Indeed, we automate as much of our lives as possible, in order to keep our attention free to respond to the moment. To regain our capacity to influence what we think and do automatically – to hack that habit – we need to bring our habitual nature into the bright light of conscious awareness.
So let’s begin our examination of habit change with what I consider to be the most useful assumption about the habits of people: When it comes to unconscious and automatic behavior, people always make their best choice (even if their best choice is to their detriment). That means, people tend to do what they do for good reason, and they are unlikely to change a habit unless they can identify and recognize a better way that serves their purpose.
I like to think of a habit as a behavioral generalization rooted in the timeline of our lives. Changing them sometimes requires that we become time and space travelers, visiting the past, the present and the future, where we can step into or out of behaviors, try them on in order to learn if there are other choices that can work better than an existing habitual choice. I also like to think of change as something that happens in stages.
Change Happens in Stages
Change rarely happens as a giant leap from old to new. More likely, it happens I stages:
- According to the “stages of change” model developed by James Prochaska, PhD, the first stage of change is Ignorance. That’s where people don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know what to do. Or, they don’t know how to do it. Or, they don’t know why it matters.
- Habit change begins in earnest when a person arrives at the second stage of change: Recognition. This is the “ah-hah” moment, in which needs, motivations, and options become conscious, information becomes available, or resources become accessible.
- The third stage of change is Planning, in which you determine specifically what you want to do and how you want to do it.
- The fourth stage is Action, where you take a step forward, evaluate it for effectiveness, then take the next step, and so on.
- The fifth stage of change is Repetition. In fact, habits become automatic through repetition and intensity, so doing something differently over and over with purpose and intention locks it into our nervous system where it can become unconscious and automatic.
The Power of Association and Dissociation
The behavioral generalization of a habit is initially built using 2 mental processes: association and dissociation. Association is when your mind connects one thing to something else. Dissociation is when your mind disconnects one thing from something else. Sweet dreams are made of these. So are our memories. We use these 2 processes to build the beliefs and behavioral patterns that become the basis of our automatic lives. And they are powerful. We can associate positive feelings to a bowl of cereal, or terror to the sight of a closet door. We can associate being resourceful with problem emotional states, or associate problem emotional states with bad choices. It really is up to us, but most people don’t realize how true this is. Knowing how this works can empower us to introduce new elements into old patterns in order to create health and healing instead of dis-ease and deterioration.
Free Association is a method developed by Sigmund Freud and used in psychotherapy to get at unconscious associations. In free association, you just say whatever comes into your mind without censoring it. I say apple pie and you say mother. I say tree and you say forest. There are many other ways to surface unconscious associations. Two of the most powerful associations in a habit are the trigger for the habitual pattern and the reward that follows.
Once we are able to consciously recognize a pattern, we can dissociate from it, and create a new association and a new result. With a little repetition and intensity, it can quickly be sealed into the nervous system.
The Anatomy of a Habit
A habit is a behavioral generalization, with roots in the timeline of a person’s life. It consists of a trigger followed by a sequence of associations and dissociations, and reinforced by repetition and reward until it becomes automatic. Rewards can be something undesirable stopping, or something desirable starting or continuing. Healing occurs when we use the processes of association and dissociation intentionally and wisely.
To change a habit, you can bring the unconscious program into the light of conscious awareness, then examine it closely to uncover when it began, how it began, when it occurs, how it is a problem, and what is a preferred replacement habit. That last bit is important, because nature dislikes a vacuum, and we can’t replace something with nothing. If we want something to stop, we need to know what we want to start in its place.
What you learn about a habit will provide you with opportunities to introduce new distinctions into the chain of events. And sometimes just examining it introduces new distinctions that change it.
I recall a conversation with one of my colleagues at a convention some years ago. He wondered if I had any mind/body tricks for insomnia. “You have insomnia?” I asked. He nodded. “Tell me about it! What happens?” He told me, “I lay down to go to sleep, and I can’t.” I asked, “Well, what do you do while you’re laying there unable to sleep?” He had to think about that, as he didn’t consciously know the answer. After a few moments he said, “I lay there and talk to myself.” “ What kinds of things do you say to yourself?” I asked. “I tell myself to go to sleep, that it’s late, that I have a lot to do the next day.” I nodded, then asked, “When you’re talking to yourself, what does that voice in your head sound like? Can you demonstrate it for me?” He did. And it sounded really angry, urgent, intense! And I had the thought that, if I was trying to sleep and someone was yelling at me, I might have insomnia too! He had associated this intense voice to the act of trying to sleep. I immediately recognized the opportunity to make a new distinction and insert it into the sequence of associations. I said, “I wonder what would happen if that voice in your head said all the same things, but said them lovingly, soothingly, encouragingly?” He looked at me like that was ridiculous. I said, “Maybe you could just close your eyes and try that right now, and tell me what happens?” So he did. And he fell asleep right in front of me.
So here’s something interesting: I’ve observed that some people use this trigger/association/dissociation process/reward pattern to create positive change in their lives. Take depression for example… IN my experience, happy people associate with positive experiences, dissociate from negative experiences. They associate with feeling resourceful, dissociate from self-doubt. They associate their desired outcomes with actions they can take, and they associate their actions with positive internal messages of encouragement. But this same box of tinker toys is used by unhealthy people to create unhealthy outcomes. Depressed people associate with negative feelings and dissociate from positive ones, lock themselves away with limiting assumptions and an old story that casts them in a negative light. Where a healthy person is flexible and adaptive to change, the unhealthy person digs in their heels on positions they take, and holds on to old grievances instead of learning from them. And they dissociate from positive feelings, like happiness, curiosity, and creativity.
In Part 2 of this article, we’ll explore the 3 kinds of habits that we can change and how to design change with each of them.