This essay is part of the series in which I talk about my learnings and insights building a habit coaching app (Nintee) in 2024. It didn’t ultimately work out because an app has marginal influence in a human’s life (v/s that of friends, family, culture and immediate environment). Most apps that work in the category operate like gyms (charge upfront when the motivation is high, and be okay with high churn). I had raised VC funding for it and later it became clear to me that this wouldn’t be a VC scale business, so I shut it down and returned the remaining funding. Hope the insights learned along the way would turn out to be valuable to others.
This series comprises of the following essays:
- Science of habit building (this one): how habits are formed and broken
- Making a product that Marl loves: why well-intentioned apps ultimately become attention-seeking and gamified
- The two views of rationality: who we think people are v/s who they really are
- How does behavior change happen: frameworks and mental models for human behavior change
- How to coach someone: 21 points to keep in mind while coaching someone
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How habits are built or broken is no longer a mystery. Psychologists and neuroscientists have figured out key mechanisms behind habits, and in this note, I want to document whatever I have learned so far (after reading 4 books on habit building and many research papers).
What are habits?
The definition is actually beautifully simple:
Repeated rewarding actions performed under stable contexts
Let’s unpack the definition:
- Repeated: habits are formed when the same action is performed multiple times. There’s no magical number though, habit formation can take anywhere from a couple of weeks to couple of months, or even more.
- Rewarding: habits are much more likely to form if there’s a reward given immediately after the action is performed. (Think of the fresh, minty taste of toothpaste reinforcing the behavior of brushing)
- Stable contexts: it’s important that context under which the action is performed remains the same, for a behavior to become an automatic habit. Think of watching TV while eating lunch. The cue becomes food, and habit becomes watching TV and reward is, of course, the entertainment. The cue-response is fundamental to habit formation. This is why people advocate habit stacking, where a new habit is stacked after a pre-existing habits. It also explains why we adopt new habits when there is a major change in life (like moving cities or changing jobs)
How to influence habit formation
Research suggests the following elements aid in forming new habits or breaking existing ones:
- Self-vigilance: Until a habit becomes automatic, continual reminders to one-self to perform an activity
- Change the environment: make good habits easier to perform (more frequent exposure to cue), while making bad habits harder to perform (less frequent exposure to cue)
- Specific implementation intentions (for strengthening cue-action loop): deciding if then-else kind of scenarios upfront as specifically and clearly as possible (e.g. when I see the elevator door, I will take the stairs instead; or when I pick up the cigarette, I will immediately break it into pieces and do push-ups)
- Implementation intentions pass the control of behavior to the environment.
- implementation intentions promote goal attainment by helping people get started.
- Repeating the activity the same way each day: it’s important to keep the context from day-to-day as similar as possible, if a behavior is to be converted into a habit
- Focusing on consistency of repetitions over doing it perfectly: aiming to make any amount of progress but doing it consistency, instead of aiming to do it perfectly
- Realistic goals first and then increasing difficulty: deciding to walk 2000 steps daily first, then aiming to increase it gradually to 10000 steps. This is because unrealistic goals fail, cause dissatisfaction and hence make it unlikely for behavior to be repeated
- Rewards and positive reinforcement: upon each repetition, if there’s a reward (of any kind), it makes the behavior much more likely to be repeated (and hence, much more likely to be converted into a habit)
Breaking bad habits
As far as bad habits are concerned, it’s commonly mistaken that the goal is to eliminate them. Instead of eliminating the bad habit, a better goal is to break automaticity of it. The underlying behaviours behind bad habits are often enjoyable (eating sugary food, for example) so eliminating them completely is often very difficult (and probably counter-productive).
Our goal then should not be to eliminate such behaviors but to promote their mindful and intentional execution.
Nevertheless, here’s how we break the automaticity of bad behaviors:
- Self-monitoring: knowing under what circumstances does one perform the habit that one wants to break, and watching oneself carefully (thinking, “don’t do it”)
- Mindfulness: being more mindful while performing a bad habit so you can consciously break the automaticity of habit
- Coping planning: Deciding on the lines of.. “If a circumstance arise which pushes me to do X, I will… ” (do something else)
- Replacement habits: Deciding on the lines.. “If I think about doing X, I will… ” (do a replacement rewarding habit)
- Change the environment: make good habits easier to perform (more frequent exposure to cue), while making bad habits harder to perform (less frequent exposure to cue)
Rewards and positive reinforcement: upon each successful execution of replacement habit (or null habit), if there’s a reward (of any kind), it makes the replacement behavior much more likely to be repeated (and hence, much more likely to be converted into a habit)
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