Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(46)
The fact that emotions create habits is both good news and bad. Let me start with the dark side.
The overall process of habit formation is exactly the same for “good” habits as it is for those we consider “bad” habits. Your brain doesn’t care if society has declared that eating cake at two a.m. is an unhealthy behavior. It still wants the pleasure that comes from eating that cake. There are plenty of behaviors that feel good (hello, video games!) and have slid into habits that we’d rather not have. The point is that your brain’s reward system is influenced directly by emotions and less directly by what society labels as “good” and “bad.” As humans, we are deeply wired for emotions, which is why most of us are a mixed bag of habits—some we want and plenty we don’t.
The good news is that we are not helpless when it comes to our brain chemistry. Using what we know about how the brain functions, we can help our brains help us.
How?
By intentionally creating feelings to wire in the habits that we actually want in our lives. When we hack into the ancient behavioral pathways in our brains, we gain access to the amazing human potential for learning and change. We have an opportunity to use the brain machinery we already have to feel good and change behaviors.
You can use many types of positive reinforcement to wire in a habit, but in my research and teaching, I’ve found that the real winner is creating a feeling of success.
Why Celebration Works Bestto Build Habits
Celebration is the best way to create a positive feeling that wires in your new habits. It’s free, fast, and available to people of every color, shape, size, income, and personality. In addition, celebration teaches us how to be nice to ourselves—a skill that pays out the biggest dividends of all.
But before you start mixing up the celebration technique with everything you’ve heard about rewards, let’s take a step back.
A word about rewards. Okay, maybe a little rant.
Many so-called habit experts have pumped up the idea of motivating a new habit with a reward. They are orbiting the right answer here because, yes, a rewarding stimulus is what activates the reward circuitry, but as with many words that have migrated from academia to pop-science, the meaning of “reward” has gotten muddied to the point of being unhelpful in some cases and downright misleading in others.
Let’s say that you have committed to running every day for two weeks, and at the end of those two weeks, you “reward” yourself with a massage. I would say, “Good for you!” because we all could benefit from more massages. But I would also say that your massage wasn’t a reward. It was an incentive.
The definition of a reward in behavior science is an experience directly tied to a behavior that makes that behavior more likely to happen again. The timing of the reward matters. Scientists learned decades ago that rewards need to happen either during the behavior or milliseconds afterward. Dopamine is released and processed by the brain very quickly. That means you’ve got to cue up those good feelings fast to form a habit.
Incentives like a sales bonus or a monthly massage can motivate you, but they don’t rewire your brain. Incentives are way too far in the future to give you that all-important shot of dopamine that encodes the new habit. Doing three squats in the morning and rewarding yourself with a movie that evening won’t work. The squats and the good feelings you get from the movie are too far apart for dopamine to build a bridge between the two.
The neurochemical reaction that you are trying to hack is not only time dependent, it’s also highly individualized. What causes one person to feel good may not work for everyone. Your boss may love the smell of coffee. When she enters a coffee shop and inhales, she feels good. And her immediate feeling builds her habit of visiting the coffee shop. But your coworker might not like the way coffee smells. His brain won’t react in the same way.
A real reward—something that will actually create a habit—is a much narrower target to hit than most people think.
I value precision in my research and teaching. I try to use words with specific and clear meanings. Because “reward” has gotten so muddled in our everyday language, I don’t use this word without defining it carefully. It’s too ambiguous and ultimately unhelpful.
Regardless of the terminology speed bump I’ve pointed out, I don’t want you to lose the thread: Your brain has a built-in system for encoding new habits, and by celebrating you can hack this system.
When you find a celebration that works for you, and you do it immediately after a new behavior, your brain repatterns to make that behavior more automatic in the future. But once you’ve created a habit, celebration is now optional. You don’t need to keep celebrating the same habit forever. That said, some people keep going with the celebration part of their habits because it feels good and has lots of positive side effects.
Another important thing to remember is that celebration is habit fertilizer. Each individual celebration strengthens the roots of a specific habit, but the accumulation of celebrations over time is what fertilizes the entire habit garden. By cultivating feelings of success and confidence, we make the soil more inviting and nourishing for all the other habit seeds we want to plant.
Fogg Maxim #2
In chapter 2, I explained Maxim #1: Help people do what they already want to do.
I discovered how important this principle was by studying what many successful products and services had in common: They helped people do what they already wanted to do. Without that, the product or service failed.