You are your Habits

Aristotle once said "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit". If you want to know why your life is where it is today, look at your past habits. Better still, if you want to know where your life will be ten years from now, look at your current habits. Our levels of exercise, diet, work routines and pretty much everything else we do on a daily basis decide much of our future success and current choices.

A 2006 study by Duke University found that up to 40 percent of what we do every day is driven by habit rather than deliberate decisions. The autopilot kicks in as soon as we get out of bed and includes how we dress, what we do for lunch, how we greet the family when we get home from work, how much time we spend relaxing, playing or chatting. Eventually bed time routine takes over and the day is done.

This raises a simple point. If you want to change your life, (be that career, fitness levels or work life balance) your habits should be first port of call. There is no shortage of self-help books that will tell you how to quit a habit, start a habit, what sort of habits exceptional people have. It is all very interesting stuff, but in reality how difficult is it to create a new habit or better still, ditch a bad one?

Habit formation research from University College London suggests that there is no one standard length of time required for a habit to form. It can take anywhere from 18 to 254 days. It will come as no great surprise that this period of time depends on how hard the new activity is and how much effort and commitment is required. Getting your 5 a day of fruit and veg might be a little easier and quicker than learning Chinese for half an hour every evening.

The research does suggest however that, for most new tasks the 66-day mark is when repetition becomes automatic and the habit takes root. These researchers did note that if you’re going to miss a day from your new found daily routine, skip a day that is further along in the 66-day period, since the pay back for habit formation counts more in the early days.

Another tip in learning a new habit is not to go for the complete personal makeover. Especially coming up to New Year it’s tempting to go for it all in one fell swoop. You start changing your exercise, diet, how you work etc. That is a lot of new behaviour to adhere to, especially in the critical first 2 months. Changing one habit can be difficult enough and is no mean feat so don’t spread yourself too thin and try changing everything at the same time.

CharlesDuhigg, has written an interesting book on habits, “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business.” Duhigg uses some good examples to explain how habits work. He looks at N.F.L. coach Tony Dungy, who, with lots and lots of practice, taught his players a small number of important moves they could perform without thinking, particularly at crucial moments in a game. When the players were exhausted, autopilot kicks in and everyone does their job. You don’t have to be an NFL line-backer to appreciate this. Pretty much the same thing happens when we get home after a night out, maybe feeling a bit groggy, take off our shoes and socks and barely know we did it.

As well as personal habits, we also have shared social habits. Some of these have been around for generations, such as shaking hands when we meet. Others are continually changing. We have seen this in the recent past where wearing a seat belt in the back seat of the car is now a well ingrained social habit; it was a very different story in the 1980s. These habits are changed by policy makers altering the norms in our society. This is the same principle behind de-normalising smoking via bans in bars, the work place and some public areas. The idea is to make not smoking the default social norm and hope that becomes our shared habit or custom.

Having habits is ultimately a good thing. They allow us to do routine tasks without wasting mental energy or having to make the same decisions over and over every day. Habits also allow us to operate within acceptable social norms so we can function as a society. Ultimately we humans are creatures of habit and it’s a case of trying to have more good habits than bad habits and being aware of how to change the habits we don’t want. List your daily habits and see which ones you want to keep. Bet you have more habits than you realise.