Struggle with habit building

Do you struggle with building habits? Do you keep trying, succeeding for some time, and keep falling off?

For example, have you been determined to go to the gym, only to lose steam in a few weeks? Have you been determined to meditate, only to drop the habits after a few weeks or months? Have you been determined to be off the social media and connect with people 1-1, and find yourself going back to old ways in a few weeks or months?

If you have, you are not alone. I have struggled with exercise, meditation, deep connection, and much more. We all have difficulty keeping good habits.

In this article, we will look into the pitfalls that we fall into when trying to develop these habits and an interesting analogy from Computer Science (CS), the subject I studied for my undergraduate and PhD degrees. I will then show you a simple strategy (borrowed from CS) to ratchet up habits so you keep your habits for the long-term (or as long as you want to keep them).

Pitfalls that cause the struggle in habit building

If you want to get the answer in one word, it is short-term rewards. Read on diving deeper into it.

The biggest pitfalls we run into while building good habits is that we start to view habit build as a sprint, instead of a marathon. We try to get short term results to feel good. We go to gym for an hour, 6 times a week, and want to see results (and we do — for some time). We meditate 20 minutes a day to feel relaxed quickly, and we might feel better — again, for a short time. We make big lifestyle changes, to get big results — fast.

But such drastic changes don’t take into account our full life (holistically) and these habits become hard to keep up with. Lift happens, and we don’t get time to go to gym, or don’t find 20 minutes to meditate. The short-term results we have gotten so far are not strong enough to keep pushing through! As quickly we were able to feel good by doing these big action steps, just as quickly, we feel crappy for breaking our promises too. Things fall off track, we feel like a loser yet another time. And we wait for the next time we will try this habit again. And the cycle goes on!

Here are two problems with this way of approaching habit building.

• We define the reward or results to come from external results… and they are unpredictable to come by. For example, losing a certain weight in the case of going to gym.
• Rewards are not strong enough for the kind of efforts we are putting. That is why when something else happens in life, our subconscious does the calculation, and deems that, e.g., going to gym for one hour is not worth it that day.

Simple strategies to overcome pitfalls

To overcome these issues, one strategy that works very well is to

• Make the habit building itself as a reward (in the beginning). If you do the action, you can get a simple reward by checking a box and keeping the streak. Or by doing a little dance in front of the mirror and pat yourself on the back. As James Clear in his book Atomic Habits says, you are building an alternate identity by building habits. It does not matter how small the habit is. Even if you only do one push up every day, you identity can shift over time to, e.g., a person who takes their health seriously, and they don’t miss any day of workout, howsoever small!
• Put small efforts in the habits in the beginning, and expect small (or better yet, zero) rewards. It is easy to put one minute of effort into a habit if you are not seeing rewards, than put an hour of effort. So, put only a minute of effort (or less) in the beginning.

Following these two strategies in the beginning phase of the habit has helped with sticking with the habit. This has worked well for me, as well as people I work with in my coaching practice.

In short, do small efforts, and make the reward predictable (like a little pat on the back, or visual feel of checking off a box).

Going to the next level

Now, let us say you have built the small version of the habit — you are going out of the house and walking or jogging for a minute each day. Now, how do you build on that? How do you go from there to working out 45 minutes each day? This is where the computer science idea of “additive increase, multiplicative decrease” comes into picture. This comes from a protocol called TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) which is widely used in the Internet to transfer data among different computers.

Let me take a short diversion into explaining the TCP. In short, the messages that we sent from one computer to another are packaged into small data packets, and those data packets are transmitted. Some of these packets are lost because of some error, or computer malfunctioning or too much congestion on the wire. When that happens, the sending computer is able to figure out that the packet was lost, and has to resend the packet. It turns out it is quite expensive to resend (it is kind of like context switch and breaking the flow). So, the computer does not want to lose packets. In other words, it does not want to fail in sending the packets. The way to not lose packets (or lose very little) is to send packets at a very small rate so as not to cause congestion in the network. And slowly increase the rate. The rate is increased slowly (add 1 at a time), but if any packet is lost, it is decreased dramatically (multiplicatively). It is halved. The ramp up is slow, the ramp down is fast. In other words, if it succeeds, it aims slightly higher. If it fails, it aims dramatically lower (so that it can succeed quickly again).

I find similarity with successful habit building very useful. In long-term habit building, the goal is to succeed (“send a packet successfully”), even if you succeed in small goals… because long-term, you will reach bigger and better habits (“the rate of packet sending will grow slowly”). Consistency is the key, and that combined with slow improvement will get you amazing results. To keep yourself psychologically in the game, you want to taste success in habit building quickly and often, and then keep improving for the long haul. If we push too hard and start doing something that we cannot maintain in the long-run, we are bound to fail. Once we fail, it is hard to get started again.

The way to apply it in habit building is this. Let us take meditation as the habit. When you have built the 1 minute meditation habit, once you can do it consistency for 1 week (keep the streak for one week), increase it to 2 minutes. If you can build the 1-week streak again, increase it slowly to 3 minutes for a week, and then to 4 minutes for a week and so on.

Now, if you break the streak when, say, you were at 10 minutes, DO NOT try to do 10 minutes again the next day. Decrease the habit 5 minutes of meditation the next day, and try to build a 7 days streak again. If you break the streak at 5 minutes, go down to 2 or 3 minutes. If you successfully build the 7-day streak at 5 minutes level, increase to 6 minutes, and then to 7 minutes and so on.

So, you see the pattern. Build a streak at the current level, and then increase slowly. On breaking the streak, decrease by a much larger amount, so you can go back to succeeding quickly.

We typically make the mistake of trying to stick to the higher goal of 10 minutes (in the above example), trying to bang our head against the wall and keep failing. And then say, we are not good at meditation. We can keep banging our heads for weeks, months and years, but never get to build the habit.

If we slowly increase from lower numbers, we can get to 10 minutes in a few weeks. Slow but steady is the key!

Okay, there you have it. Increase the amount of work you do for the habit slowly (adding small numbers), and reach a comfortable plateau (typically a streak of 7 days) before increasing it again. But if you miss a day, or don’t meet the goal, decrease the goal dramatically, decrease it fast (halving it is a good idea typically) and work on the smaller goal. If for some reason the smaller goal is also not doable, slash it again into half. Eventually, you will reach a habit amount that is doable for you. In this process of slashing down, one time I went down to down to doing 15 seconds of wrist rotation. No amount is too small when it comes to habit building. The goal is to succeed, not keep promising high and keep failing.

Slow is definitely the new fast when it comes to habit building

There you have a formula for successful habit building.

• Small Start: Start with small actions, making the habit itself a reward or adding some small deterministic rewards (like appreciating yourself). Make action so small that you can do it even if it does not involve any reward. Rewards would come, but genuine rewards take a few weeks or a few months to come by. To see them, we need practice to stick with the actions, and it is a lot easier to stick if what we require of ourselves is small. So, start small. Small actions. Preferably something that can be done in under a minute. Nothing is too small an action.
• Slow Increase, Fast Decrease. When you have built a streak, slowly increase the time commitment in your habit. Once you reach the streak (of around 7 days) at the new level, increase again by small numbers. If you don’t carry out the habit some day, decrease the target by big amount. For example, go from 30 minute commitment to 15 minute, or even smaller 10 minute. And build a streak at the smaller commitment again and slowly increase from there.

This small start, and beautiful dance of “slow increase and fast decrease” will keep you in the habit building game for a long time (because you will taste success very often), and you will not burn out. Habit building is not a sprint. Play it like a marathon, and you will be a pro in no time!

Speaking of marathon, if you want to actually run a marathon, you can start by running 100 meters, or even 10 meters if you have never run before! That is the kind of small steps we are talking about.

What’s in store for you?

What is one habit you would like to build in the next year, and what is the equivalent of the “one minute” version of that habit? Can you get started on that today? If yes, what is it? If not, why not?

Answer this question. This is the most important part of the article. Take an action!

If you have any question, feel free to ask it away!