Go Beyond Good & Bad: The Better Way to Think About Habits

We tend to conceptualize our habits into two categories: “good” and “bad”. Build good habits and remove bad ones. It sounds simple but it is more complex.

All habits have a functional purpose. Even the bad ones.

Instead, a different lens to examine your habits is through its strength. Measuring the strength of a habit will give you a better opportunity to assess how easy or difficult it will be to build or remove a habit.

Habits exist on a spectrum of strength. From easy to break (exercising) to needing an outside intervention (psychological addiction).

I like to put habits into different categories of strength since different factors play a part in making the habits easy or hard to do. One category is sticky habits.

Sticky habits are easy to maintain and hard to stop. They rely primarily on friction, cues, variable rewards, and ego depletion. These habits will persist unless you get strategic. They aren’t hard to break however, if you know what drives them. Checking Instagram or watching Netflix fall into this category.

Self-Control won’t work for sticky habits. Why? These types of habits rely on ego depletion. When tired, we go for low-hanging fruit. Checking social media and watching TV are low-energy, easy behaviors.

Friction is a better tactic. We know that services like Instagram and Netflix rely on making it easy to start using their product. So, make it harder. I call these effort obstacles. An example is logging out of the app after each use. Make it even harder by changing your password to something difficult. An added benefit is it adds intention by making the behavior less automatic.

Another method is removing the cue. Your phone is part of the environment. We have learned that picking up our phones gives us variable rewards. Scheduled times of phone separation can help. Keep your phone out of sight. Time with your phone is time on your phone.

A replacement activity is another strategy. You can’t remove your TV from your living room, but you can put a book on your sofa. Reading isn’t as passive as watching TV but can be done in the same environment as your TV habit. And if you are logged out of Netflix, picking the book will be easier when you are depleted.