Habits: Simplifying Change
"Change is hard" is a familiar sentiment—one that I heard myself express just the other day. However, what if numerous changes in our lives could actually be quite simple?
What happens when we allow what can be simple in our lives, to be simple—so that what is truly complex has more room to be complex?
Wendy Wood, a renowned social psychologist and expert in habits, highlights that approximately 95% of our behavior is habitual. In line with the idea that "we are what we do," transformative change in our lives includes successfully changing our habits. And what if the process of changing our habits is less about difficulty and more about nourishment?
This notion is proving itself to be true, altering the way many individuals approach change itself.
Here is a Habits map to facilitate such a process:
Step 0—Tune in to the essence: What change is being called for? This "Ecology of Care" map can serve as a tool for exploration.
Step 1—Invest greater attention toward nourishing behaviors over focussing on behaviors that need reduction or completion.
Step 2—Play the habit game, making behaviors you want to grow easier and easier to do, while making those you want to reduce more and more challenging to do.
Step 3—Measure your progress backwards, “you with you.” People who measure their progress in relationship to how far they’ve come consistently perform better than when they focus on how far they have yet to go.
Step 4, back to Step 0—Sensing and responding, learning and discerning, returning to the beginning—over time our change muscles become more skillful, robust, and even playful, generating momentum, increased strength, and changed conditions, all contributing to a durable positive feedback loop.
Let's use sleep as an example.
Extensive research highlights the critical role that sleep plays in our overall well-being. It affects our mood, cognitive function, inflammation levels, dementia risk, professional performance, relationships, and much more.
Improving sleep quality often requires changing multiple related habits and addressing complex challenges. These habits may include avoiding afternoon caffeine, maintaining balanced blood glucose levels throughout the day, reducing liquid intake in the evening, increasing physical activity, managing stress, and refraining from nighttime activities like binge-watching or excessive scrolling on social media. Additionally, we may need to tackle complex challenges such as hormonal imbalances, creating a conducive sleeping environment, and in our cultural context learning to prioritize sleep in the first place.
Confronting all these issues can feel overwhelming, reinforcing the belief that change is hard. What’s possible when we shift our focus from fixing ourselves or the problem to a focus on what nourishes us? And, what’s possible when approaching the process with the habit game?
Consistently achieving restful sleep has been a long-standing challenge for me, and I had grown accustomed to being chronically sleep-deprived. I had tried for years to change this (actually, it was more like beating myself up, chastising myself, committing with declarations that I’d do better, desperately trying lots of hacks), and had accepted to a degree that this whole healthy-sleeping thing was something other people did.
A turning point came when I shifted my focus toward nourishing myself with just one night of delicious sleep. I dedicated a day to the experience. While it did involve addressing many of the same contributing factors that a ‘fixing’ approach would have, my motivation felt decidedly different, and I used the habit game—making the things I wanted to do more of easier to do, the things I needed to reduce harder to do. Approached as an experiment in nourishing myself, I was less afraid of failing. This was “me with me”, rooted in what I wanted and needed for my own brain and well-being.
What happened? I did indeed enjoy a restful night's sleep. More importantly, the process provided valuable insights, uncovering blind spots, barriers, and beliefs that I had been avoiding seeing while attempting to force the change through sheer determination.
This experiment made it easier to address other related habits by also approaching them from a perspective of nourishment. I genuinely wanted to address them, and this all helped to create a positive feedback loop—leading eventually to an identity change. Today, I am a person who values sleep and takes aligned action. Who, me? Really? After years of knowing I should make a change, wanting to, and struggling to do so, this seemed to happen naturally.
During stressful or busy periods, I can slip back into old patterns. When I experience the dreaded 2 a.m. wake-up without being able to fall back asleep, I remember the years that this was my norm. Rather than experiencing this as falling off a cliff, though, I feel genuinely motivated to reset. I recognize it as part of the journey, not an indication of failure.
Such a lens and process can be applied to exercise. And, to eating well. And to changes in our relationships. And to professional commitments and goals. And to negative thought patterns. And to technology use. And to money. And, and, and…
When we view change from a perspective of fixing and correcting, change is hard—hard to initiate, hard to implement, and hard to maintain. From a lens of care and nourishment, positive feedback loops support our momentum, making it possible to live into our changes.
Being kind to ourselves can often be the most difficult form of kindness to practice. In line with the notion that "we are what we do," such a shift in how we engage with our habits invites a broader habit of kindness towards ourselves—and is arguably the most important habit of them all.
Resources:
Hidden Brain Podcast: Creatures of Habit
Primary Food concept, Institute for Integrative Nutrition
"Atomic Habits" by James Clear
"Good Habits, Bad Habits" by Wendy Wood
"The Gap & the Gain" by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy
”Own the Day, Own Your Life” by Aubrey Marcus
“Why we Sleep” by Mathew Walker
