Why is It So Hard to Form Lasting Habits?

Note: This article is based on the work of journalist Scott H. Young, in which he tells us about his experience in acquiring good habits for himself and how his life changed afterward.

However, motivation fades away over time, and if your goal requires a month or more, motivation alone won't be of any help. You'll need to build and stick to habits to achieve your goal.

Habit-building methods are great because they turn short-term motivation into something more solid. If you put your energies into following regular, ongoing routines that use incentives, rewards, and punishments, you can turn your motivation into a steady, structured outcome.

Law of Changing Habits

This transition from motivated impulses to stable habits often feels so powerful that people experiencing it for the first time become obsessed with it and try to teach it to those around them.

A friend of mine recently experimented with building and sticking to habits, going from struggling to hit the gym regularly to managing dozens of habits using complex engineering systems.

I know that there are many bloggers - people who have blogging as the main activity in life. A blog is like a free-to-read online diary. It has brought fame and fortune to many bloggers who have succeeded in reaching wide audiences while talking about shaping habits. This is partly due to the topic's popularity. Still, I suspect the real reason is related to powerful and effective habit-building methods that people feel compelled to blog about.

I may know this because I was one of them. My life shifted from suffering to completing small projects or plans to the end to coordinating and arranging my habits between eating, exercising, reading, sleeping, productivity, etc. People who didn't go through the same experience must have thought that I went nuts, but the truth is simply that it was the first time I could do so.

Habits are effective in the medium term

I've been using habit-changing techniques for over a decade now, and if I followed the basic premise of habits - a habit must last for several months to become permanent - I would've had time to stabilize dozens or hundreds of habits permanently, but that didn't happen.

If I look back over the last ten years and the time I've spent working with fixed habits, I was often more inclined to acquire new habits than to carry on with old ones and work on them.

I can think of only two habits that were more or less permanent. The first is when I was a vegetarian, and now I'm a fish vegetarian - being a vegetarian but eating fish and seafood. That is, meals are free of animal meat and chicken only. The second is the daily or weekly goals I set for myself.

I had some habits I practiced for a long time (i.e. going to the gym), which I stuck to for several years before I had to reconsider, in addition to many habits that I had to resume and change every few months, such as morning rituals.

In the end, when you make an effort and invest your energies right from the start, you promise yourself to build a stable and solid system for your life later, but some habits require constant efforts to maintain.

Actions require two types of effort

Getting any work done requires two types of effort. The first is an internal effort that depends on the desired action, and the second is an effort to decide to take this action or not. Habits can change the first effort, but they mainly succeed by eliminating the second type.

To illustrate, let's say your goal is to read a book every week, and then you decide to make a habit of this goal. In this case, you decide to read at least 50 pages of the book a day to achieve your goal.

Every time you read that book, you put those two types of effort into practice. First, depending on the difficulty of the book you're reading, you may or may not make any effort at all. You'll see why when you imagine the difference between a book on quantum physics and a book in the Harry Potter series, a series of seven books by a British writer who tells the story of the wizard boy "Harry Potter", a fictional character.

However, if the book you intend to read requires much effort, it also requires a secondary cost of effort, which is the effort needed to overcome the urge to procrastinate and start reading the book.  So, if you ever feel tired after a day of doing nothing at all, you'll understand the cost of effort we're talking about.

From my experience, it seems that following structured habits reduces these costs in different ways:

1. Habits reduce the cost of internal effort by making you better at doing the task. The more difficult books you read, the more your reading abilities will develop and the less energy you'll spend on them.
2. Structured habits reduce the effort required to decide whether or not to perform a task by removing ambiguity about when and how a task will be accomplished. So, if you read 50 pages a day at lunch for three months, you'll automatically start reading on your next lunch break without giving it much thought.

Reducing the cost of the second effort is much greater than the first for many tasks. For example, flossing didn't get easier the 100th time, but I stopped thinking about whether or not to do it.

Habits are semi-stable

The idea that there are two types of efforts in accomplishing tasks explains several aspects of my own experience with building habits, specifically the following:

1. Not all habits are created with equal ease

This makes sense because some habits require a higher internal effort and, therefore a greater effort to decide to implement them.

2. You can't build and stick to an unlimited number of habits

Even if the effort required to make a decision can be dispensed with when sticking to structured habits, you'll have to make the internal effort that depends on the type of work you intend to do. This means you can build several habits that are inherently simple, like flossing your teeth, but not several hard and complex ones, like reading boring books.

3. Most habits are semi-stable

Semi-stability is a physical concept indicating that the current state of some things is stable, but any small disturbance can break this stability. For example, the pendulum has two stability points, one when the weight is placed at the bottom and the other where the weight is perfectly balanced at the top. However, the pendulum returns to the bottom if it receives a slight push, while it'll never return to the top if it receives such a push.

This idea of semi-stability is consistent with my own experience, which is why I found a few well-established and permanent habits. The habit breaks inevitably because of any temporary change in lifestyle, such as going on vacation, getting sick, or needing to work overtime, which creates a kind of shock that's often enough to break the habit and let go of your goal, so it becomes far from automatic or spontaneous when you try to return to practicing this habit.

How to Deal with Medium-Impact Habits?

The semi-stability of habits suggests that the most important situations to consider when building one are during potential disturbances. If you have to break a habit for a while, your top priority should be to rebuild it and stick with it once the reason for the disruption is gone.

It's better to avoid breaking any good habit you have and switch to a backup habit when you do. This translates, for example, into reading five pages of a book instead of 50 when you're busy or exercising at home instead of hitting the gym while traveling.