Habits 101
You’re lazy. I’m lazy. Humans are lazy. We, as humans often times choose what’s most convenient to us at any moment in time.
From an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense to be as lazy as possible and pick the easy choice over the harder ones. Why spend extra energy when you don’t need to? It’s ingrained for humans to prioritize choices that provide us with the most benefit that expends the least effort.
If you make an action easy, we tend to prefer it. Conversely, if you make it difficult, we tend to shy away.
It’s kinda like that law of physics: “Path of Least Resistance” except applied to human behavior. We naturally gravitate toward the option that requires the least amount of effort.
Brief Aside: Habits
Most of our daily lives are guided by habit. Without really consciously thinking about it, we tend to follow the exact same morning routine without fail. I’d bet that if you wrote out exactly what you did in the morning, it’d look remarkably the same. Some variation of “hit snooze a couple of times, scroll through social media, brush teeth, turn on the TV, make breakfast…” and so on.
Our brains are on autopilot for most of the day and that’s a pretty good thing. It’s nice to just naturally know what to do. It saves us the mental energy of having to decide on what to do next. When we find ourselves in a situation we’ve been in before, we often times repeat what worked best for us last time. Why try something new where the outcome is unknown when we can just stick to what works?
It also turns out that large parts of life are generally pretty static for bursts of time. We wake up every morning in the same house, go to class at the same campus, drive to the same workplace, live in the same neighborhood, etc.. Your average day looks the same (more or less) so it’s not a surprise we tend to do the same thing ever day. As a result, it’s extremely common to slip into a routine for events that repeat from day to day.
Ok back to the point, I’m Lazy AF… So What?
Well, we have the following two points:
- Humans are lazy and choose what’s convenient most of the time
- Most of our behavior is repeated subconsciously out of habit
Putting the two together, we come to the following:
We have an easier time forming habits from actions that require little of us. These habits form a basis for lots of our daily behavior. 1
Well honestly, if you’re like me, you’re probably thinking “no shit” or “so what” to a degree. I just repeated what I said. And well, you’re right. But I think wording it this way helps us better understand why bad habits are so difficult to break and why good habits are so hard to form.
Bad Habits Form Easily
Habits save us so much mental power and time; we can just default to some behavior that we know will work. But habits can be a double edged sword. Having a default behavior is nice… unless that default behavior isn’t the best for us in the long run.
I’m sure you’ve had experiences with some of the following:
- Mindlessly scrolling through your Instagram feed
- Swiping to view the next trending TikTok
- Inhaling to take a hit of your flavored vape/e-cigarette
- Munching on that party size bag of French Onion chips
These are all incredibly simple actions to perform that benefit us in the short. Businesses fully understand the principle that humans tend to gravitate toward products that require little effort to use. They make their service as easy to use, and get us hooked by providing some sort of relief. Scroll and swipe to cure your boredom! Inhale and breath in to get a rush of dopamine! Just reach into the bag and enjoy!
While these things that yield an immediate reward, it often come at the cost to us long term. Spending time on social media ultimately wastes time you could’ve spent doing something productive, hitting a vape comes at the cost of becoming dependent on nicotine, eating that bag of chips puts on the pounds.
But because these are all actions that require so little from us, it should also come as no big surprise that these are some of the most common habits of a typical college student. We tend to form habits from things that require little effort and once we start solidifying that habit, it’s really hard to stop.
Because the negative consequences affect us in the long term and not in the present, it’s extremely easy to minimize and downplay their effects until it’s too late. And since these bad habits often require so little of us, with just a little temptation (even just a visual cue), we can end up slipping back into the habit fully knowing that it isn’t good for us long term.
Good Habits Require Conscious Effort
Conversely, things that we generally strive for require work on our end. Everyone wants to eat healthy. Everyone wants to be fit. Everyone wants to read a book a day.
But subscribing yourself to a diet that avoids your favorite junk food is difficult. Going to the gym takes effort and leaves you feeling tired. Reading a book a day takes up too much time. It’s so much easier to pop open a bag of chips, lie in bed on your phone, or go play some video games instead. We’d rather be lazy and default to something that doesn’t take as much energy and yields us better short term rewards.
This is made worse because the reward for good habits are often delayed. Eating healthy once doesn’t lose you immediate weight. Working out only doesn’t magically make you buff. Reading a single book isn’t going to change your life.
Good habits require work. They don’t magically occur on their own. Without conscious effort, we’d just stick to making lazy choices.
Final Thoughts
All of this is provide a brief precursor to building better habits. I’m of the opinion that in order to build better habits, you have to first understand why good habits are hard to form and why bad habits are so easy to slip into. If you don’t have a good mental model of the problem, then you’ll never be able to form a solution. There will be future blog posts about actual strategies later!
This blog post is inspired as a result of personal struggles toward building good habits. I’ve been recently trying to go to the gym consistently, cook healthier, and write more for this blog without too much success. Wanting to form good habits doesn’t actually form good habits. Kind of like how new year’s resolutions never quite work out.
-
This is extremely hand wavy. I still stand behind my main point flawed in logic in not. ↩