The Secrets to Setting Habits That Stick: Understanding the Habit Loop

Habits are like elusive pots of gold that we all strive to reach for, but often find them just out of our grasp. They promise a better life filled with more productivity, success, and better results in every arena we choose to apply them. Although, setting habits is a difficult task. Most habits are not something we can just think about; we need to actively try to implement them, remind ourselves to think about them, and even keep written reminders in the corners of our homes that remind us to think about them!

In an effort to set up a habit, we often fall into the trap of thinking that certain myths surrounding habits are true. “21 days for a habit to sink in,” “habits must have positive reinforcement,” and “you must go ‘cold turkey’ for a habit to sink in” are some of the myths that are often propagated. The truth is that these myths may not necessarily be wrong, but they are incomplete.

Thankfully, setting habits is not as complicated as we believe it to be, and understanding the habit loop can go a long way in helping us set up habits that stick. In his book, The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg provides a treatise on habit-setting techniques. For our purposes, we’ll focus on the simple method of habit-setting in human adults using Duhigg’s research.

According to Duhigg, a habit is not a singular effect in the brain, but it is a “chain” of related events, which he calls the “Habit Loop”. The Habit Loop consists of three components: the Cue, the Routine, and the Reward.

The Cue or Trigger phase is what “triggers” a certain routine. It is the start of a habit. The Cue can be anything from walking past the snack machine at work when you go to the restroom, or it can be more complex, like seeing a particular sign on a particular road when you’re driving with a particular person.

The Routine is the part of the Habit Loop that’s triggered. It’s “what you do” after the Trigger. You see the snack machine and immediately feel hungry. Your brain pushes you through the Routine until the Reward is reached. In trying to chase a reward (usually subconsciously), the reward stage comes at the end of the Routine.

The Reward stage is exactly what it sounds like, though it doesn’t need to be an actual positive effect. It’s the final stage in a habit loop and tells the brain that the Routine is finished. Because habits usually end in rewards, like “eating a bag of chips and feeling satiated,” or “running a mile and feeling accomplished,” we describe this stage as a reward.

Duhigg describes what we can do to target and change a particular habit that we think is “bad” into something we’re happier with, by making the subconscious Trigger and Routine stage something we’re conscious of. The most effective thing to do is to keep an index card and pen or pencil with you at all times and create a tally mark each time you find yourself going through the habit loop.

A perfect example of this is Duhigg’s nail-biting test subject. Each time she felt the urge to bite her nails or actually found herself biting her nails, she made a tally on the card. After a few weeks, her index card was so full of tally marks that she had to start on the back of the card. She was acutely aware of the Trigger phase and knew exactly when her nail-biting urges would strike.

The nail-biting subject found out that her Habit Loop looked like this:

Cue: The desire to bite her nails (caused by stress, wanting something to do, whatever)

Routine: Instead of biting her nails and carrying on about her day, she now marked a tally on the card.

Reward: The reward of biting her nails (less stress, anxiety, whatever) was still there.

She still bit her nails, but her Habit Loop changed slightly so that she was more conscious of her “bad” habit.

Duhigg encouraged her to change the Loop slightly – just the Routine phase. He had her add an “–” dash next to each tally mark, which represented when she effectively fought the urges. She recognized the Cue to bite her nails but didn’t bite them. She marked a dash on the index card instead. The Reward was the satisfaction of making a tally-mark and dash when she didn’t bite them.

After a short amount of time (remember, she’d already spent a few weeks building a new Habit Loop for nail-biting), she no longer needed to bite her nails. The urges were still sometimes there, but her Habit Loop had changed, and the reward was no longer biting her nails; instead, it was the satisfaction of making a tally mark and a dash when she didn’t bite them.

The power of this exercise is immediately and effectively useful to anyone, whether biting their nails, smoking, drinking too much, or whatever the “bad” habit might be. We can use the Habit Loop and the research behind it to set new habits for ourselves that remove “bad” habits, set new “good” habits, or even make drastic personality changes in our lives.

In conclusion, understanding the Habit Loop can help us set up habits and stick to them. Habits can be notoriously hard to break, and these myths surrounding habits don’t help anyone. Knowing the components of the Habit Loop and following the simple steps can replace bad habits with good ones while maintaining the reward cycle.