How Understanding Your Habits Can Change Your Life

It all starts with the mention of 2 compelling books that you may have heard of:

• Atomic Habits by James Clear
• The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

Both books, in their ways, mention an important concept known as the “habit loop”. Made up of 3 parts, Cue-Routine-Reward, the habit loop is a pattern used to describe what causes us to form a habit in the first place.

Catch Your Habit Cues

The cue can be anything, maybe it’s the stress of work that makes you want to open up a bag of chips, turn on Netflix, and simply check out. Or the dryness of your lips that makes you whip out and apply your lip balm. The exciting and shocking study Duhigg reviewed on Pepsodent is a great example of the habit loop.

Pepsodent, a toothpaste brand in the 1950s, put teeth-brushing on the map. Before Pepsodent a shocking 7% of Americans owned a tube of toothpaste. And how they did it gets even more interesting.

Pepsodent labeled your “teeth film”, also known as plaque, as a cue. They marketed that as soon as you feel that “teeth film” you need to use their paste to achieve beautiful teeth. 10 years after the start of the campaign, Duhigg revealed that the original 7% shot up to 65%.

How to Drive Behavior Change

The psychology behind this dramatic increase lies in a concept described in Atomic Habits. Clear established guidelines for behavior change with these 4 rules:

• Make it attractive
• Make it obvious
• Make it satisfying
• Make it easy

More than 50 years before these guidelines existed, Pepsodent was able to get thousands of Americans to hop aboard the teeth brushing train by making the cue obvious – your teeth film! Once people ran their tongue across their teeth and felt teeth film, they were inclined to brush their teeth, which leads us to the routine.

Rally a Routine

The routine is the action taken immediately after the cue. When someone lifts a camera and says “say cheese” you immediately smile. When you get home (especially after the pandemic-trauma) you may wash or sanitize your hands.

For the Pepsodent users, the routine became the act of brushing your teeth. And what’s more? After they did that, users would feel a sense of “clean” and freshness in their mouths. Plus their teeth were looking better!

Make Your Habits Rewarding so you Crave them

Clear explains that rewards come in many forms, good and bad. The reward after a long run is the mood-boosting runner’s high. Similarly, some feel rewarded with the feeling of relief after puffing on a cigarette.

For Peposdent users, the clean feeling was the reward that many began to crave.

How do we get our habits to stick? Yeah, I may go to the gym today, but I probably don’t want to go again tomorrow — I’m tired and sore, right?

Clear and Duhigg label the craving as the key to keeping up with habits.

Back to that cigarette example, users will smoke 5 packs a day because they crave the relief that comes with each puff. The runners will crave that mood-boosting high they get. It becomes embedded in them to reach for these habits when presented with their unique cues.

Pepsodent, very brilliantly, and according to Duhigg unintentionally, slipped a “tingling agent” into their products to make you crave it. You know your minty toothpaste? Yea, that — hook, line, and sinker! Once you followed the routine of brushing your teeth several times, you started to crave the minty freshness that came with brushing.

Take a Day to Watch Yourself and Pick a Habit to Manipulate

Now how can this be applied to your life? Think of a habit you have. This requires some introspection. Think backward and review what happened right before you performed the routine.

How I Rewrote Social Media Scrolling & Boredom Habits

I know for me, when I am trying to relax I will want to do something mindless – like watch TV or scroll the socials. In those moments, I pause and ask myself, what am I trying to feel right now? What caused me to end up on social media for 30 minutes? Normally it’s 9-5 stress. Or all of the “things” that need to get done around the house.

With that awareness, I am now able to redirect and rewrite my routine. Instead of scrolling social media when I am overwhelmed, I write down all the things that need to be done. Otherwise known as mind-dumping. Then I tackle the easy stuff I wrote down. By doing this not only am I more productive, I am in control.

Similarly, I find many of my unproductive habits occur when I am bored. I like to stay relatively healthy and sometimes I reach for food when I am bored. In these moments I find that I am perfectly satisfied and don’t need a snack, but I reach for chips (and can’t stop eating them) just because.

To rewrite the routine, I started keeping a book within reach. It sits in the middle of my living room as a reminder that, if I have any downtime, I can always read a few pages. With that small change, I keep calories down, learn more, and am now writing posts reviewing books!

With high regard, I recommend both of the books mentioned in this post and have links to them down below. I welcome you to observe your habits today and pick one to rewrite. I look forward to hearing what habit changes you were able to make in your life.