We become what we repeatedly do

Your beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values, and your values become your destiny. —Mahatma Gandhi

The basis is simple — we are all creatures of habit, and we start and maintain habits to store up cerebral power so we can handle more intricate and tricky concerns. These habits can be positive, negative or neutral, but once established, they stay with us and lie in wait, lurking to be rediscovered.

Habits are important in our lives, because about 40 to 45 percent of what we do every day are actually habits.  And a large percentage of whether we succeed or fail is based not on our big strategy decisions, but on our habits.  The basic question is, why when we reach 35, 40 or 50, we suddenly lose 60 pounds and start running marathons; or after a lifetime of arrears, why do we abruptly change the way we use our money and stash away something for the future?

Take the case of wearing seatbelts. In the not-so-distant past, we habitually failed to wear them. In 1984, 86 percent failed to buckle up, but by 2010 this “habit” had turned over, such that 85 percent now use their seat belts as a matter of course. This behavior change did not entail knowledge of a new routine, as what occurs when we provide thousands of minutes learning to play the piano or any musical instrument. After all, we already knew how to take the belt and insert the buckle into the receptacle. It became part of our consciousness because of the shifting standards in our society prompted by legislation in some countries. Social psychologists have revealed that a useful way of transforming many customary behaviors is to change our observations of the norms that rule them, which can result in reduced practice of bad habits. Studies establish that once you understand and think about the structure of a habit, it becomes more convenient to modify that habit. And once you modify that habit, you begin implementing tiny, incremental tweaking to your day that over the long haul can add up to an enormous difference.

A proper understanding of our habits reveals that they can be changed. As Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life and Business, said, “Once you understand that habits can change, you have the freedom and the responsibility to remake them. Once you understand that habits can be rebuilt, the power becomes easier to grasp, and the only option left is to get to work.”

Duhigg became interested in this principle more than a decade ago when he was a reporter for The New York Times in Iraq, where he met a major who had been given the assignment to stop riots from happening in a town named Kufa. What the major did is to go down and remove all the food vendors from the plazas. He discovered that by doing so, he actually broke up the patterns that would cause riots to emerge. Riots actually take six or seven hours to develop. What happens is a small group of troublemakers shows up and then spectators grow in number until the crowd gets so big that it somehow draws everyone into the violence. By removing the kebab sellers from the plazas, people went home when they got hungry since there were no more food sellers in the area. So the crowd got thin. With this simple change of pattern, the major was able to disrupt the riots that were happening.  As we usher in 2014, Duhigg gave us some more sense of habits and how they impact our lives in the following principles:

• The habit ring is made up of three elements: a cue, a routine, and a reward. A cue is like a trigger for an automatic behavior to start, a routine is the behavior itself, and a reward is how your brain learns to remember this pattern for the future. How these elements are manipulated helps amend our habits — from crashing on the couch with a bag of chips to heading out to the park for a brisk walk. It’s deceptively simple. Your alarm goes off in the morning (cue), you shower, eat breakfast, and brush your teeth (routine), and you get out the door on time and without forgetting anything (reward).

• Keystone habits help ignite a domino effect that affects all other aspects of our lives. Exercising, sleeping well and making time for family togetherness at the dining table are fine examples of these practices. Willpower is the greatest keystone habit, and it can be taught. It can become habitual if we choose a certain behavior ahead of time, and follow that routine when a stress point arrives.

• To break a bad habit, keep the old cue and deliver the same reward, but insert a new routine. Any behavior can be changed if the cue and the reward stay the same. For example, every afternoon we get up from our desks to take a break, and we stop at the cafeteria to grab a coffee and a cookie. The reward is we feel good after doing so, but we gain weight in the process. We can break the habit by replacing the cookie with an apple. The cue and the reward stay the same. As such, habits cannot be completely eradicated, but they can be substituted. This principle has influenced treatments for alcoholism, obesity, and other disorders or destructive behaviors.

• There is something powerful about groups and shared experiences. We might be unconvinced about our ability to change if we’re by ourselves, but being with a group will convince us to hang up our skepticism. If we want to quit smoking, overdrinking, or overeating, join a group. Bad habits are not destiny, but we must resolve to change behaviors, do the difficult job to spot the cues and rewards that drive our habits, and find options. We must believe we can take control, and do it.

• We cannot stop a habit; only override it with a stronger one. Small changes in the environment might not trigger our habits and if we can work out our cues, we might be able to stop the behavior we want to change. However if we cannot change the trigger (or we cannot identify the trigger), we cannot often stop the habit. We can, however, create a stronger habit that overrides the other habit if we can connect the cue and reward, simply replacing the behavior with an alternative habit. We do have to be careful, though, because our underlying habit still exists, and we might still revert to it under times of stress.

How many times have we said to ourselves that this is the year we will quit smoking or go back to more active exercising? Sean Covey stated, “We become what we repeatedly do,” but we can control what we repeatedly do — particularly the bad kind — from controlling our lives.

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