Old Habits Die Hard: How to Make Positive, Enduring Lifestyle Changes
By Kendall Hopwood, for Revive Your Life
Smoker? Time to break the habit...Photo by cmd-p.com
When it comes to breaking a bad habit or initiating a new routine, the temptation to hit the panic button and eject from the pilot’s seat can be overwhelming. In fact, research shows that only one in ten people weather the storm and keep their resolutions for a whole year.
Why do our best intentions succumb to self-sabotage so frequently? The challenges to sustaining and achieving a goal - whether it’s to lose weight, eat out less frequently, or give up caffeine - are not only mental, but physiological and environmental as well.
Initiating Positive Change: External vs. Internal Attribution
Making an enduring lifestyle change - and not just plummeting on a crash diet or short-lived, kamikaze workout routine - requires an understanding of the factors that comprise a particular habit. Attribution is strongly correlated with action, or conversely, inaction.
As a general example, let’s consider the goal of losing ten pounds. If a person attributes their excess weight to genetics and bad luck - external factors, they’re unlikely to take action to remedy the situation because they believe the causes are out of their control. On the other hand, if a person attributes those extra ten pounds to eating too much fast food and a lack of exercise -internal attributes, they can implement a plan to target the specific factors causing the problem.
Psychologist Albert Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy reiterates the importance of attribution; unless people believe their own actions can bring about a positive outcome, they are unlikely to take action or to persevere in the face of adversity. Consider the language you use, whether it’s verbal or an internal dialogue, when approaching goals for habit change. By asserting your power to successfully change an element in your life, you’re already well on the way to success.
Rewiring Your Habits
The difficulty of digging out an old habit and replacing it with a new one, even if it’s something as simple as not watching television while in bed, is further compounded by physiological factors.
Habitual activities literally become ingrained as neural pathways are changed. Whether the habit is gambling, smoking, or eating refined sugars, the brain is altered as neural patterns are established in the basal ganglia, a region of the brain related to action selection and reinforcement learning. According to Ann Graybiel, the Walter A. Rosenblith professor of neuroscience in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, “It is as though, somehow, the brain retains a memory of the habit context, and this pattern can be triggered if the right habit cues come back.”
From a physiological standpoint, it’s necessary to form new habits that are stronger than the old. Establishing a new routine, like reading for ten minutes rather than watching television before bed or having a glass of cold water rather than soda in the afternoon, changes the patterns of neural pathways and helps to overcome the continuation of undesired habits. While the new habit may require conscious effort to enact at first, over time it too will become an ingrained, automatic response.
Changing Habitual Cues by Changing the Environment
The maxim old habits die hard is accurate from an environmental perspective as well.
According to a recent study at Duke University, the environment plays an unequivocal role in changing a habit or instilling a new one. Wendy Wood, James B. Duke professor of psychology and neuroscience, asserts that it doesn’t just take willpower to achieve a desired outcome. “Many of our repeated behaviors are cued by everyday environments, even though people think they’re making choices all the time,” Wood says.
Much like the issue of attribution, understanding the context and the triggers of your own behavior will help in instituting effective changes. For example, a person trying to eliminate fast food from their diet should change the route they travel to avoid environmental cues that stimulate them to stop for a bite to eat. Wood further explains, “You need to change the context. You need to change the cues. And that requires understanding the triggers to your own behavior.”
Tips for Establishing Healthy New Habits
Swapping one habit for another or beginning a brand new routine typically takes three weeks, or 21 days. Understanding the factors that affect habit change will help in creating an achievable goal. Here are several other tips to aid in the day-to-day challenges of modifying a habit or initiating a new one:
- Work on changing one habit at a time, not multiple habits.
- Write down a start date for your habit change and commit to the change for 21 days.
- State your goal using positive language, not self-deprecating terms. For example, rather than saying, “I want to stop being such a lazy couch potato,” phrase your goal positively: “I want to go for a walk three times per week.”
- Write down the reasons for your habit change; these can act as motivation if you’re tempted to give up on your goal.
- Talk about your plan to change your habit and recruit others for support. By talking about your intentions, you’ll be more likely to follow through.
- If you relapse into the old, unwanted habit, don’t label yourself a failure. Accept the relapse, accept yourself, and move forward.
- Don’t let the fear of failure stop you from initiating a change.
Though it may be true that old habits die hard, it is possible to override an existing routine by stating a positive goal, understanding the underlying factors that need to change to reach the goal, and persevering for at least 21 days.
Do you have difficulty implementing positive changes in your life? What have you learned from your failures and successes? Please share your thoughts with the RYL community in the comments section below!
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I agree working on one habit at a time is best! I have tired to change too much too fast and nothing really got accomplished when I had to much on my plate.
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