Human brains like habit because the brain understands things it already knows. Our neurological system feels safe and non-threatened: ‘it’s okay human, it’s not a Sabre tooth tiger, we’re all good’. We often do the same things at the same time on a regular schedule, sort of like loops. These loops help us function and enable our brains to know what comes next. Our neurological system associates habit with safety and feels safe and non-threatened. We feel comfortable. Some habit loops are good, but others are not actually our friends at all and do nothing but hold us back with fear and anxiety: pretty much we don’t like stepping out of our comfort zone. To change the habit loops that don’t serve us, though, we need to spot the tickets holding us back and change the context that triggers them and our thought process around them.

How Habit Loops Form

So where do these ‘habit loops’ come from? A bit like how conscious bias works so our brains understand repetition and ‘been here before’, our brains equate behaviors repeated in consistent settings as something that can be easily processed because it’s familiar. It can process things and situations faster and with less thought, then relying on behavioral cues to activate an automatic response or thought patterns, which then forms a habit. Sort of like the habit of brushing our teeth: we don’t give much thought to the process because its so familiar. Most readers will have heard that to change a habit takes changing our routine for 3 weeks so form a new habit which thus becomes automatic.

The Best Way to Change our Habit Loops

And yet, while our brains like consistency on the one hand, on the other it also likes to tell us to conserve energy for the time when that Sabre tooth tiger might appear in front of us meaning we’ll need to use our energy to shift into flight mode. So, the only way to change our habits or routines is to change the context by disrupting the routine to break the habit loop (given we don’t regularly encounter Sabre tooth tigers these days).

The thing is this: we live in the 21st century – we actually have the ability and wherewithal to effect change if we want … If we don’t like our habits and we’re smart enough in modern society to realize and rationalize that they’re holding us back and do something about it.

Except we live in such a fast-paced society in which we have so many choices it can sometimes become overwhelming to make any decisions at all. So, to change our habits we often times find ourselves not being able to rely on willpower alone: what we need to do is change the context that triggers the habits in the first place and consciously plan to formulate new ones. Drinking getting in the way? Don’t buy the drink in the first place. Social calendar getting in the way? Limit to certain days of the week or only a certain number of events. Can’t find the time to work on your coaching side hustle or other interests? Get better organized using lists, time management plans, and better meal planning to create better routines and carve out the time you’re spending on the domestics of life when your time doing the mundane could be better spent elsewhere. So how else might we overcome our nice safe habit loops and lack of willpower? HIRE A COACH!

It all comes down to the fact that to change our habits or routines we need to change the context in which they occur by actively disrupting the habit routine to break the loop.