In With The New Year and Out With The Bad Habits

BERKELEY HEIGHTS, NJ: Every year, billions of people swear they're going to make some changes this time.

Typically, these resolutions involve wealth, health and happiness.

But why wait until January 1st and forget about them by January 31st?

Good habits can begin anytime.

They just don't come easily or quickly.

Before Setting New Goals, Understand Your Current Habits

I've written previously about habits and perception, and one of the problems with both is that we're not always aware of how much they influence us.

When people aren't aware of the “how and why” behind their habits and perceptions, they can sometimes find themselves in places with little understanding of how they got there.

Habits influence our perceptions, and our perceptions can reinforce our habits.

You can see the conundrum.

How do we know which habits we've consciously chosen and which ones we've accumulated without realizing it?

A New Year's Resolution Needs a Foundation

Since habits can be good or bad, it's just as important to eliminate unhealthy or unhelpful habits as it is to accumulate good ones.

Practicing the discipline of honest awareness and observation of our current habits may be a better way to start the New Year than immediately reaching for goals that have no foundation beneath them.

Before asking:

"What do I want to start doing?”

perhaps we should also ask:

“What am I already doing that's getting in my way?”

Sometimes removing a bad habit may accomplish more than covering it with good intentions.

Either way, patience is required.

How Long Does It Take to Build a New Habit?

You've probably heard the popular claim that it takes 21 days to form a habit.

It's a nice, tidy number.

Reality isn't quite so tidy.

One frequently cited study on habit formation found that the time required for a behavior to become more automatic varied considerably among participants, with a median of about 66 days.

The more useful lesson isn't that 66 is the magic number.

It's that habits take repetition and time, and different behaviors and different people won't necessarily follow the same schedule.

Changing a habit isn't a countdown.

It's a process.

Understanding the Cue, Routine and Reward

One useful way of examining habits is the cue, routine and reward framework popularized by Charles Duhigg in *The Power of Habit*.

The basic idea is fairly simple:

Cue: What triggers the behavior?

Routine: What do you do in response?

Reward: What are you getting from that behavior?

Suppose every time someone feels stressed, they reach for something sweet.

The stress may be the cue.

Eating the sweet is the routine.

The reward might be comfort, pleasure or simply a momentary break from the stress.

Simply taking the sweets away doesn't necessarily address what the person was actually seeking.

Understanding the cue and the reward gives us an opportunity to experiment with a different routine.

Instead of simply asking, “How do I stop doing this?”

we can begin asking:

“What is causing me to do this, and what am I actually looking for when I do?”

That's a considerably more useful question.

Martial Arts Is a Study of Habits

The study of martial arts excels at breaking down and examining habits.

What happens if an attack or stressor enters my space?

There's a cue.

Now what do I do?

Depending upon the situation, the routine might involve de-escalating, creating distance, evading, blocking, speaking assertively or responding physically when necessary.

Then comes the reward.

In training, that reward can be the satisfaction of moving your body, engaging your mind and successfully solving a problem under pressure.

That's the type of instant gratification I can endorse.

But repetition is what matters.

We practice appropriate responses over and over so that awareness, decision-making and movement become increasingly familiar.

We're developing habits deliberately instead of simply hoping the right response appears when we need it.

Sometimes Improvement Means Removing Something

When we deal honestly with a habit, we have a better opportunity to understand how it may affect us over the long term.

Small behaviors repeated for years aren't necessarily small anymore.

So don't stress yourself out this New Year by simply putting more unrealistic demands on your plate.

Take the time to become aware of your habits.

Take the time to organize them by separating the useful from the harmful.

Take the time to discipline yourself to change the ones that are getting in your way.

A New Year's resolution doesn't always have to mean adding something else to your life.

Sometimes the best resolution is simply lightening your load.