The Essential Elements of Habit Change
Have you ever wondered why breaking a bad habit feels so difficult, even when you know it’s holding you back? As a therapist, much of what I aim to achieve with my clients involves mental habit change. I see this as the heart of most therapeutic approaches and techniques; it’s where a lot of the work occurs to make meaningful change.
There are other important areas of therapy as well, of course, such as enhancing my clients’ self-insights, creating a trusting and supportive professional relationship, as well as learning how my clients describe their identities and which cultural backgrounds shape their experiences. These other areas provide my understanding of what needs to be changed, and they provide the tools for my clients and I to work together on change. However, I see my client’s current habits of mind as the collection of thoughts and behaviors that contribute to their difficulties. Changing these habits of mind, therefore, could lead clients to healing.
Examples of Mental Habits
Habits of mind can be very behavioral, such as taking multiple work breaks to smoke a cigarette in the week leading up to your semi-annual performance evaluation, or reaching for a bag of snacks in the cupboard when you arrive home to an empty apartment and are reminded that you don’t have any weekend social plans. Another example could be reaching for a video game or loading Instagram when you are reminded that you have a term paper due in three days or a midterm exam for which you haven’t studied yet.
Habits of mind can also be intensely emotional. For example, being afraid to go out on Thursdays because Thursdays are garbage collection days, which means that a lot of black plastic bags will be on the sides of the roads, and you remember how such bags were used to disguise IEDs during your deployment in the Middle East (This deep-seated fear response, seemingly triggered by the ordinary sight of black bags, highlights how past trauma can shape our present emotional habits.). Another example could be feeling sad around the beginning of November because your mother died, and her birthday was in December; this means that you won’t get to see her for Thanksgiving and you won’t be celebrating her birthday or any other special days with her anymore.
Some habits of mind can seem weighty and meaningful, and you might not want to change them, regardless of how upsetting they are. But some are just ludicrous. For example, for many years, the sight of my cat grooming himself in certain regions of his anatomy would trigger an involuntary mental soundtrack of Madonna's “Express Yourself,” and the soundtrack seemed to stay on repeat for hours. However, one day, I did eventually discover an antidote–I would hum a few bars of Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way,” and that seemed to immediately exorcise “Express Yourself.” Yet, it took me a long time to learn and to incorporate this new habit into my collection.
But I digress. The purpose of this blog is to discuss the elements of habit change. Why is this information important? Because knowing about the necessary ingredients of habit change can tell you whether you are ready for therapy, and/or help you to prepare for therapy.
Element #1: Having and Knowing Your Personal Standards for Behavior
You are not equipped to view your habits as “good” or “bad,” as “helpful” or “unhelpful,” as “adaptive” or “maladaptive” unless you recognize that some of your behaviors run counter to your desires, self-expectations, preferences, self-standards, or personal values. If someone else is able to point out your behaviors, tendencies, and patterns as causing them problems, but you don’t view them as personally problematic, you are unlikely to do anything about changing your habits. If anything, you are more likely to become defensive and irritated, rather than invested in learning new behaviors.
For example, if your doctor tells you that you should eat more green, leafy vegetables to improve the fiber content of your diet, you are likely to ignore this piece of advice–among all the other recommendations during your annual check up–if you do not see the value in complying. However, if your gut health and your regularity are important to you and consistent with your self-image, this bit of information would have more relevance and would contribute to greater success with a change in your diet. Also, when a new habit is more consistent with your self-view (“This is who I am.”), it is more resistant to motivation loss. A 2020 meta-analysis found that when a new habit becomes part of how you see yourself, you're more likely to stick with it (Swann et al.). Research also confirms that current habits incompatible with one’s identity are harder to sustain, while those actions fitting with what's important to you are more resistant to the loss of motivation (Sheldon & Elliot, 1999; Rosenstock, 1966).
Where your own standards come from is a broad topic. What constitutes a 'desirable' or 'undesirable' habit can be influenced by cultural norms and values, by unique regional and community preferences, by lessons learned from your core and extended family, and by your own personally-held values and preferences. To learn more about this, please see my blog post on Self Awareness Theory: How We Learn to Become Our Best Self (Duval & Wicklund, 1972).
Element #2: Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is a broad domain in the psychological literature spanning such areas as interoception (sensing and interpreting signals from within the body) to meditation and mindfulness, to consciousness. Self-awareness can be conscious or subconscious. However, for habit change to be effective, you should be fully awake and attentive, and your self-awareness should be in-the-moment and granular, rather than abstract and global.
What do I mean by “in-the-moment and granular”? As an example, recognizing a general tendency toward self-criticism is a good start, but real change happens when you notice these thoughts as they arise in the moment. This in-the-moment awareness gives you the opportunity to intervene and choose a different response. In fact, Baumeister highlighted the importance of here-and-now self-awareness in breaking automatic behaviors (Baumeister & Vohs, 2016).
For example, when you were getting ready this morning and glanced at yourself in the mirror, did you automatically make a wince of disdain, or did you actively recall that your mother told you that you would be the “_BLANK_ one of the family” if you weren’t careful with your eating? The issue here is not the source of the judgment (in this case coming from parental comments); what is critical is the difference between just being aware that you tend to be self-critical, versus actually watching a moment of self-criticism unfold as it is happening. Knowing that you are thinking or behaving in an undesirable way in the moment is better than having purely abstract awareness of your tendencies; observing it as it happens gives you more information about the behavior and more preparation to counter-act it with healthier options.
Element #3: Motivation to Change
Habits can be intractable things, very hard to change. This is because they are so automatic that we don’t even think about them. Making behaviors habitual and automatic takes time and effort, and we know implicitly that some of this effort might be unpleasant. In other words, there are typically plenty of demotivating aspects to creating and changing habits.
For example, if you set a goal to begin running marathons three times per year, and you never ran any kind of race before, you can see that a lot of preparation lies before you. You must make the effort to collect items and gear that you can use in a marathon, such as appropriate footwear and clothing, as well as easy-to-carry items to manage heat, perspiration, pests, hydration, first aid, and telecommunication, to name a few. You must also make the effort to get out and do some running to get yourself ready for an actual marathon. Instead of watching the evening news or your typical comedy on Netflix, you might have to forgo these pleasures to run around the block, or to scout a route for a 2-mile run. Later, you might need to devote more time to trying a 5K or 10K run, or a quarter- or a half marathon. Preparing for a marathon might even be painful–you might develop some muscle aches or even tendonitis until you learn to stretch regularly in advance of a run.
In other words, you have to be pretty devoted to marathons in order to put the energy into preparing yourself for them. They are nowhere near as easy to complete compared to some comfy couch surfing. Why do you want to do it? What is your motivation? Is it consistent with your identity? Is it for the purpose of changing your lifestyle and health outcomes? Are you drawn to the drama of marathons? Did you have a beloved aunt who was a marathoner, and this is how you would like to honor her? Do you need a new challenge and this seems right up your alley? Are you drawn to the idea of having sponsors who will donate to charity based on your performance?
Knowing the source of your motivation, being able to name it–AND being able to remind yourself of it when the process of habit change becomes difficult–will allow you to keep chipping away at your new goal.
Element #4: Opportunity to Practice a New Habit.
I remember when I traveled to England to study abroad. On arrival to my destination city, I was hauling my luggage from the train station to my new residence, and I was following the etiquette of staying on the right side of the sidewalk. I could not understand why people seemed to be deliberately walking directly in my path and giving me funny looks–I gave them my “irritated American” looks in return. To my chagrin, I was reminded later that citizens of the UK drive on the left side of the road, and hence, they likely walk on the left, as well. Oops!
Even armed with this new knowledge, however, it was extremely difficult to alter my behavior every time I went out for a walk! It also happened indoors in busy hallways. I kept having to revise and adjust my behavior, and it took a lot of conscious effort and attention, with numerous mistakes. Only after about 6 weeks, with little time remaining in my travels, did I feel like I had caught on effectively and a new habit had started to form to replace the old one.
As I said before, creating a habit takes time and effort to automate the behavior so that we don’t have to think about it anymore. If you ever asked for and were given a bike as a kid, you didn’t know how to ride it effectively without previously applying your feet to some bicycle pedals. A lot of aspects of bike riding are not intuitive. Knowing how to turn the handlebars, how to lean into a curve with your body, how to avoid obstacles, how to stop quickly without braking too hard, and how hard to pump the pedals with your feet requires learning and experimentation.
Training wheels, a helmet, and parental coaching is all well and good, but they provide limited value in comparison to how your body and your limbs figure out what works and what does not. Learning such brain-body communication takes practice and probably a lot of mistakes. Scientists who study the brain have found that doing things repeatedly strengthens neural pathways–and habits are formed of neural pathways.
In other words, to learn a new habit, you will need to give yourself some time and opportunities to practice a new, desirable behavior (Graybiel, 2008; Lally et al., 2010). In truth, it is possible to completely extinguish well-established habits, but this can be tricky and difficult. Instead, your best option is to develop a new, more adaptive habit that can run in parallel with the old habit, so that you have new choices offering preferred outcomes. In fact, Gardner et al. (2022) found that consistent practice actually causes newer positive behaviors to be prioritized as options.
Do you want to be nicer to your dog, but you find that you yell at her a lot? Start giving her treats, telling her that she’s a good girl, grooming her with a hairbrush in a way that she likes, and showing her positive attention. Then, watch how she responds. With enough practice at this, you might find that it is not only personally rewarding for you, but you also enjoy your dog’s reaction when you politely ask her to move out of your way–rather than the reaction that you get from yelling at her when she is standing between you and the kitchen.
Conclusion
So what do you do with all of this information? Did you think that you would get all the answers from reading this post? I’m a psychologist, and I cannot ethically or effectively give you your answers without knowing more about your individual story. However, knowing something about habit change can possibly help you to understand what has been going on in your mind or getting in your way. Understanding these elements might help you to engage more effectively with the therapeutic process and give you a framework to approach your own desired behavior changes.
You could start to think about the usefulness of counseling by asking yourself, “How would my life be different if therapy was successful?” Would you have better control of your emotions and your emotional reactions? Perhaps your behavior would change in ways that would make your life healthier or more fulfilling. Would your relationships with others improve, or perhaps your relationship with yourself? Maybe your thoughts would become less negative and more objective. In that space between your current lived experience and your ideal life resides the heart of change that could provide healing and peace.
If you’re ready to explore these elements in your own life, therapy can provide the support and tools you need to make lasting change. Feel free to reach out to me to begin your journey.
References:
Baumeister, R. F., & Vohs, K. D. (2016). Strength model of self-regulation as limited resource. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 54, 67–127.
Duval, S., & Wicklund, R. A. (1972). A theory of objective self awareness. New York, NY: Academic Press.
Gardner, B., Rebar, A. L., & Lally, P. (2022). How does habit form? Guidelines for tracking real-world habit formation. Cogent Psychology, 9(1), Article 2041277.
Graybiel, A. M. (2008). Habits, rituals, and the evaluative brain. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 31, 359–387.
Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009.
Sheldon, K. M., & Elliot, A. J. (1999). Goal striving, need satisfaction, and longitudinal well-being: The self-concordance model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(3), 482–497.
Swann, W. B., Jr., Buhrmester, M. D., Gómez, Á., Jetten, J., Bastian, B., Vázquez, A., ... & Zhang, A. (2020). What makes a group worth dying for? Identity fusion fosters perception of familial ties, promoting self-sacrifice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 118(4), 775–793.
Rosenstock, I. M. (1966). Why people use health services. Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, 44(3), 94–127.
