I read The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg because I wanted to manage my habits and get rid of the bad ones. His main claim is that most of what we do can change if we change the routine behind it, and that this can change a lot more than the habit itself.
What is a habit?
A habit is something you do without thinking. Eating dinner at 1 p.m. every day is one. In code, so is your bracket style:
if () {
}
or
if ()
{
}
You don’t think about where the brace goes. You just type it. A habit can be good, bad, or neutral.
Why bad habits are hard to break
We want to drop the bad ones, and mostly we can’t. They’re difficult to overcome, especially when we’ve had them for most of our lives.
How to get rid of a bad habit
Two steps:
- Recognize it. Look at the habit and ask yourself how long you’ve been doing this.
- Accept that it will be uncomfortable. What you’re doing is wrong, and changing it won’t be pleasant. It’s going to be hard.
Take eating healthier. Say you start out overweight and build a habit of working out 3 to 4 times a week and eating better. In a few months your lifestyle can look completely different. The hard part is getting there. Nobody changes eating habits in one second. If you tell yourself “I won’t eat that food from now on”, you will probably fail. Duhigg’s point is to go in small steps. We want to reach the goal fast, and that’s how we fail.
So start by making one of your five daily meals healthier. After a while, add another, and another. In the end the whole pattern has changed, and you probably won’t want to go back.
This works for any habit. I used it for reading. A few years ago I read zero books in a whole year. That sounds ridiculous to me now. I wasted a lot of time I could have spent on good books, and I’d likely know more today, earn more, or at least feel better about myself.
It takes time, commitment and perseverance. It’s a slow process.
The small step is the point. Don’t set a goal of fifty books. Pick one tiny, repeatable action, such as a few pages a day, and protect it. The same logic applies to money habits: setting up an automatic transfer is a small step, and I wrote about it in why you should have a financial cushion.
Apps for tracking habits
Apps help here. Most let you pick a habit and mark it done each day, and the line of progress looks good when you don’t break it.
I use https://www.thehabithub.com/ and recommend it. It’s simple and built only for habits.
You can find similar apps on https://www.reddit.com/r/Habits/, where many people share how they’re changing their lives by improving habits.
Habitica is another one. I haven’t tried it, but several people recommended it to me.