Habit Loop

Every #Habits has their triggers to send our brain a message letting our Basal Ganglia to take over.¹ For instance, every month you drive home from work to stop by at McDonalds to buy some fries. Calling it your “cheatday”. That cheatday once a month becomes twice a month. Twice a month becomes once a week. Then once a week becomes twice a week. You promise to yourself to consume fast foods as occasionally as you planned your diet, but sometimes you just can’t help it. Since it already became a habit, every time you drive home after work, your brain decides whether to go straight to McDonalds or go to the gym. Driving home was your cue or trigger. You park your car at McDonalds parking lot similar to how you park your car outside the gym. Someone takes your order and you order the same burger and fries combo you always have as if on cue–routine. Now you take a big bite out of your burger, that familiar yet exhilarating burst of flavors in your mouth, grease dripping down the side of your lips all the while fitting a french fry on whatever space you have left in your mouth sometimes chomping it down like a carrot. Thinking, you deserve to treat yourself every once in a while for working so hard, its time to “reward” yourself. A once a month commitment turned into a habit, and potentially into a lifestyle.

Habit loop has been very well used and studied for many applications: Dietary regimen, sports, advertising, etc. The book, The Power of Habit, tells different ways habit loop has been adopted by many advertisers that made them very wealthy in the process. The key to creating a strong habit outlined in the book, was to create an obvious cue and clearly define the reward. Having an obvious recurring cue is like having a biological alarm clock that tells us to do specific things at specific moment, to achieve a certain goal–the reward.