Making and Breaking Habits

I’ve been helping some clients develop new habits to keep them organized. I’ve written about habits over the years (see, for example, The Power of Habits) but my observations about how we are making and breaking habits here in my own home has opened my eyes a bit.

When an action becomes automatic, it frees up your brain to focus on other things. If something becomes a strong enough habit, you don’t even remember doing it. That makes it very hard to break a habit, or to form a new habit.

Establishing a new habit requires you to interrupt the automatic flow of actions. Here is an example. I bought my husband some daily moisturizer with sunscreen in it and suggested that he use it every morning. Because this was a new habit for him, he left it out on the bathroom counter so that he would see it and remember it. However, he’s not a visual person, so he basically stopped noticing it and thus didn’t use it. When we realized that this wasn’t working, we came up with a new strategy. We put it inside his medicine cabinet right in front of something that he uses every morning. There’s no way he can ignore it. I checked in with him today and he said this was working for him and he has been using the product every day.

I am, however, a visual person, so I make or break habits using visual clues. Here’s an example. I use a steroid inhaler every morning and every night to control my asthma. My doctor recently suggested that I reduce the dosage from two puffs to one puff. That sounds simple enough, but I’m used to picking up the inhaler at the appropriate time of day and taking two puffs without thinking. It was hard for me to change that. So I started storing the inhaler upside down. When I reach into the cabinet to get my inhaler every morning and every night, it makes me stop and think because the orientation is not what I expect. That causes me to be mindful of how many puffs I’m taking.

If you are trying to make or break a habit, think about what cues would work for you. If you’re a visual learner like me, see what you can disrupt to get you to remember to do something differently. If you’re an auditory learner, setting a microwave timer or an alarm on your phone might work. If you’re a kinesthetic learner, you can try a physical roadblock like what worked for my husband.