What’s in a habit?

I always thought habits would lead me down the path to not thinking, and by way of that, to complacency. A rebelliousness in me said that habits were surely not for me.

After repeatedly being told by personal mentors and those in great books that habits were essential, I considered what it might look like to build habitsintentionally, but it still felt orthogonal to who I was. I was not someone who had a routine. I was go-with-the-flow.

In considering what changed, two things come up for me. First, the habit I accidentally built by stating a lifting routine. In this practice, there were things within the routine that were challenging and different - increasing weight, strengthening willpower, overcoming mental blocks. But those were unlocked because of the routine itself.

Second, the idea that habits exist no matter what. The challenge was not about building habits for the first time. It was about acknowledging the habits that I had already built unintentionally and considering which of those I wanted to maintain, which I wanted to get rid of, and then, what new habits I wanted to be part of my life.

Doing what you want to do: Willpower

The point of building a habit is to do something that you want to do consistently without that thing costing a lot of willpower and energy to do. If you hate going to sleep at a certain time each night and aren’t already doing it consistently, it will cost you willpower to do. The same thing could be said about exercising, cooking, meditating - whatever you may want to do.

In my view, willpower is a very daily limited resource. It can also be built up like a muscle. If you feel like you need to check your phone or you want to eat something that is not part of your diet, and you actively use willpower to avoid doing so, it will make it harder to use willpower again later that day. But the act of using your willpower one day will strengthen your ability to use on future days.

One hard part of this is that things that you don’t want to build into habits also require willpower. Having a difficult conversation with a colleague. Not getting angry at someone who is rude to you on your commute. The more will power you use here, the less you have to do the things you want to do (like meditate).

Habit fundamentally reduces the need for willpower. This allows you to use your willpower for other difficult things each day - or to build new habits.

Small Frictions and Unknown Unknowns

The other side of doing something new that you want to do is that there are small things that get in the way that are hard to account for.

For the longest time, I constantly struggled to prepare and bring my lunch to work. Rationally, I knew the downsides: I was often eating things that were outside of my diet, I had less control of how my lunch and snacks affected my energy levels, and I was almost completely unnecessarily spending $15-20/day for this suboptimal outcome.

Overcoming this struggle required more than just dedicating time to meal prepping or cooking more. There were small frictions to packing my lunch that I just didn’t think about. What containers should I use to physically bring my lunch? Where are the fridges and microwaves along my weekly schedule? What foods actually taste good when you reheat them?

Taken as discrete problems to solve, these are not very difficult things to figure out. But taken in passing - as a small thing that comes up tangentially in the process of trying to do something new - these were progress killers. It was easy to give up or procrastinate upon hitting these small roadblocks because they weren’t contextualized as part of a big enough effort where I would be inclined or forced to overcome them.

Intentionally building a habit: the power of the 30-day challenge

Knowing all this, by what mechanism can build new habits? One thing that has worked for me is a hardcore 30-day challenge. Figure out the habit you want to intentionally form, find a period in your life where you will have the willpower allotment and consistency to focus on it, and power through doing it every single day for 30 days.