|
ON AUTOPILOT
Small simple steps repeated lead to habits. Our habits are a core part of who we are. Various studies have shown that somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of what we do every day is the product of a habit. That means that half of our lives is governed by what scientists term automaticity. This percentage might sound high to you—it certainly did to me the first time I heard it—but consider how many things you do every day without really thinking about them. You brush your teeth without thinking about it. You check your phone at predictable intervals. You drive to the office and don’t particularly recall how you got there. You zip up your jacket, get a glass out of the cupboard, and click on the TV remote automatically.
This, of course, is essential to how we conduct our lives. Could you imagine how overwhelming it would be if you had to think about every single thing you did? If even brushing your teeth required some conscious level of calculation, you’d be exhausted by 10 in the morning.
“Without habit loops, our brains would shut down, overwhelmed by the minutiae of daily life,” writes Charles Duhigg in his best-selling book, The Power of Habit. “People whose basal ganglia are damaged by injury or disease often become mentally paralyzed. They have trouble performing basic activities, such as opening a door or deciding what to eat. They lose the ability to ignore insignificant details—one study, for example, found that patients with basal ganglia injuries couldn’t recognize facial expressions, including fear and disgust, because they were perpetually uncertain about which part of the face to focus on.”5
James Clear, author of the best-selling book Atomic Habits, says, “The habits you repeat (or don’t repeat) every day largely determine your health, wealth, and happiness. Knowing how to change your habits means knowing how to confidently own and manage your days, focus on the behaviors that have the highest impact, and reverse-engineer the life you want.”6
“All habits serve you in some way,” Clear told me. “As you go through life, you face a variety of problems. You need to tie your shoe; your brain is automating the solution to that problem. That’s what a habit is. It’s the solution to a recurring problem that you face throughout life, one that you’ve employed so many times that you can do it without thinking. If the solution doesn’t work anymore, then your brain will update it.”7
Clear identifies the habit loop as having four components: a cue, a craving, a response, and a reward. Using the example of turning on a light when you enter a room, the cue is walking into the room and finding it dark. The craving is feeling that there would be some value in the room not being dark. The response is flipping on the light switch, and the reward is that the room is no longer dark.8 You can apply this loop to any of your habits, such as getting your mail when you come home from work. The cue is reaching your driveway or front door at the end of the day. The craving is hoping there’s something in the mailbox. The response is going to the mailbox to find out. And the reward is getting the mail out of your mailbox. You probably didn’t think about any of this until you actually had the mail in your hands.
Creating habits to automate essential parts of our lives is a fundamental streamlining technique that we do largely unconsciously, often to our benefit. Of course, we also automate all kinds of things that we’d probably be much better off not turning into habits. I’m sure you know some version of this. Perhaps a cue is walking past your kitchen pantry. The craving comes from the knowledge that your favorite chips are in the pantry, and your innate desire to eat them. The response is that you go into the pantry, open the bag of chips, and take out a big handful. And the reward is crunchy, salty, fatty deliciousness . . . that doesn’t benefit your health in any way. Our negative habits operate with the same level of automaticity as our healthy ones. Those chips are in your stomach before you’ve even had the opportunity to register that you were stuffing them in your mouth.
Now, because you’re in the process of becoming limitless, you know that perpetuating negative behaviors is a drain on your superpowers. So, how do
you break bad habits and, just as importantly, how do you create new habits that will help you?
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
