So it is less than 2 months into 2016 and my well thought out intentions for the year have already started to slip, in particular getting more sleep which has been shown to have lots of health benefits. This study shows that 40-90% of other people who, like me, have set out the year with good intentions have likely done the same. Where have so many of us done wrong?
There are a lot of great books written about the theory of habits, for example ‘The Power of Habit‘ by Charles Duhigg and others by writers like Gretchen Rubin. But how do you apply these theories in this situation? Charles Duhigg has written extensively about the control our habits exert on our lives and in particular The Habit Loop. The Habit Loop is in its simplest form is a cue, followed by a routine, and leading to a particular reward. By isolating and then breaking up even just one of those elements you can break a habit and replace it with something else.
A key element many of us face is overcoming the thing that researchers have labelled the ‘intention behaviour gap‘ which basically means the difference between having a good intention to change a behaviour and turning that intention into action (and hopefully good habits.) Knowing that you are responding to a cue and are following your bad routine doesn’t help anyone. This has been fairly well studied across a wide range of situations, not just the ‘new year, new me’ ones. If you want to go further into the science this detailed article that gives a great breakdown of the where the science is at and what a lot of the health outcomes associated with it are. I wish I’d read it before I’d started.
The key is going past “I’m going to sleep more” and planning out the details of what the triggers are and how you will deal with the situation you want to change. In particular removing the need for making the decision to break the habit at the time it is happening. It’s often those moments of weakness that we are trying to change. So try to boil it down to a single sentence outlining the situation: “if this happens then I will do this.” And rather than denying yourself a reward look to replace it with something that’s both positive and healthy.
Hopefully taking this into account I can get back on track – there’s plenty of time to make 2016 the year I followed through on my goal.
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