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How to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones Using Alter Egos?
- Content Admin
- May 29, 2024
- 12 min read
Updated: Jun 2, 2024
We are our habits!
About 40% of our day is doing our habits.
Was it time to check your mobile phone or did it happen without conscious effort?
Do you plan to switch off the lights when you leave a room or it happens ‘naturally’?
Habits are our automatic behavioral patterns that are etched into our neural minds and are performed without any/much conscious effort. The key to transforming your lives is building these healthy automatic response mechanisms, both for individuals and organizations.
In this blog we will discuss everything you need to know about habits and lastly see how the Alter Ego Community's 10-step Framework can help you cultivate good habits and give up the bad ones.
Why are building habits so important?
When you are learning to drive, you are conscious about everything. You turn to see if you put the right gears, confuse between clutch and brakes. Playing music distracts. But eventually, with more practice, you start to free some neurological space in your minds and enjoy long drives and music while the other part focusses on remaining alert. You no longer “plan” your actions in slow traffic or a street dog suddenly deciding to cross the streets. It becomes your reflex!
Building habits frees you to make space for something new. Every habit first takes conscious efforts, strong intent, and proper planning to start and then practice. practice, practice gets you in autopilot mode. Now with this extra neurological bandwidth, you can focus on improvement, or try something new along with enjoying the rewards of building the habit.
Thus, habits are the key to self-improvement.
Also, self-improvement is a habit!
How to Build a Habit?
The most popular books on habit transformation ‘The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg and Atomic Habits by James Clear explain the neuroscience behind our Habit Loop.
Researchers from MIT discovered a 4-step neurological pattern in all our habits:
Cue is the trigger or moment of impact that initiates the habit routine or pattern. For example, binge eating when stressed, reading a book when you go to bed at night, or checking your phone first thing in the morning. The stress, going to bed, or waking up are the cues.
Cravings are the motivational force behind the habit. We crave the change a habit delivers, not the habit itself. You crave a cigarette for instant relief from stress, not the process of lighting the cigarette and smoking it.
Routine is the habit itself. The action that follows the cue. Over time these actions have been an instinct or the natural way of responding to the cues.
Reward makes the habit worth doing again and again. The cue is about noticing the reward; craving is about wanting the reward; and the response is about obtaining the reward.
Habits with instant rewards are easier to pick while the ones with delayed rewards take time to develop. Mostly, it’s the good habits that take time to reward and that’s why they are difficult to create and maintain. Going to the gym regularly is more difficult because it takes time to get the results. There is an instant release of dopamine but that's not the initial motivator for people. They want to look better, lose weight or gain weight; and that takes time! It is only later when it becomes a habit that you continue your workout for your daily dose of dopamine.
How to create a good habit?
All the answers lie in the habit loop itself!
Make it more prominent: whatever triggers good habits, create more of them. Say, being more active when you wear sports shoes. So make sure you are wearing sports shoes more often.
Make it more attractive: Satisfy the cravings and make it more attractive. Say publishing on social media about your everyday gym routine, or blogging about a new habit.
Make it easy to do: The routine should seem easy to do or at least to start. If you can convince yourself to read a book for only 2 minutes, you will probably end up reading longer than that. It’s more difficult to start than continue. Once it gets you started, you are more likely to complete the task.
Make it more rewarding: Once you start posting on social media people appreciate your workout discipline, along with the dopamine it will boost your confidence and reputation even more. This reward will make you crave for it the next time.
How to break the Bad Habit Loop?
Eliminate the cue or the craving: If you eliminate the cue from occurring or overcome the craving caused by the cue, you will not have enough motivation to act. A cue could be anything. Coming back home, lying on a bed. These are regular things. Not everyone is triggered by it. But for you, it triggers a craving. So if you can contain any of it, the behavior will not occur.
Create Friction: If you can’t eliminate the cue or the cravings, make it difficult to do it. Add more layers. Make the routine difficult to access. For example, brushing your teeth after eating reduces the cravings, or walking a mile for every cigarette instead of buying the whole pack helps reduce consumption.
Replace negative routines with healthier habits: Sometimes, we can’t control the occurrence of cues and dealing with cravings takes time. You can change routine and reward mechanisms to break the loop. You could also replace chocolates with healthier alternatives like yoga bars, dates, fruits, or anything that gives the same “reward” as chocolates. You could also try new things that give the better reward you seek so that your current reward seems less and disappoints/discourages the neuro system from repeating it.
Forcing functions: Forcing functions are behavioral strategies that force your commitment to a new behavior. For example, buying gym membership to force yourself to turn up for gym. You could also use default settings such as setting auto-debit to your savings account at the start of the month to build the habit of saving.
Find alternate more rewarding (good) habits: Even if cue, craving, and routine happen but don’t provide the same rewards or we are dissatisfied with the rewards, we will not have the motivation to repeat the act. You need to find a more rewarding habit to slowly shift from old habits. The whole game is finding the loophole in your personal habit loop, start with easy things first, and gradually tackling all four (cue, cravings, routine, reward).
Easier said than done?
Let's find why do find it difficult to sustain a habit.
Why is it so difficult to sustain a habit?
Most people do manage to start a new habit loop. We fail to sustain them. In a study that examined how many New Year’s resolvers stuck to their resolve, it was found that 77% of resolution-makers maintained their habit for a week, but only 19% remained committed after 2 years. Generally, for all habits, James Clear says “at least 8 times out of 10, you are more likely to fall back into your old habits and patterns than you are to stick with a new behavior”
The odds are not in your favor.
Failing to identify the root causes
Many a time, our response to cues originates from a flawed mental model or belief. If you are a poor listener and always feel like making your point when someone else is speaking, a short-term solution could be to practice silence, take a breath and count to 10 to distract the urge to speak.
But also address why you feel the urge to talk. Do you want to validate your opinions? Or does your low self-esteem feel a sense of power when you cut others? Or you want to be heard because you were never listened to?
A long-lasting change happens when the mindset is replaced with a more positive and productive belief system.
Wrong Strategy and improper planning
Trying to do too many things all at once
Habits are our automatic response mechanisms and doesn’t take a lot of planning and conscious efforts to do them. That’s why doing everything at once doesn’t work for people. When each of the 20 tasks in your ideal routine seeks deliberation, you are exhausted from planning itself. We have all made study plans that we never could stick to, haven't we?
This is why starting small, with a couple of habit changes, making them a ritual, and then focusing on the next set is the ideal approach to building a healthy lifestyle. Gradually you would snowball into the ideal self who does all the 20 things that you intend to. But it would take time and proper planning.
Your environment matters
If you are environment is not healthy to support your growth, you can’t develop a healthy lifestyle. From the habit loop, we understand curtailing the cues is key to change, especially when you are starting with new habits development. It is imperative that your environment supports you and limits the cues from occurring. Say, the entire family decides not to store chocolates or junk at home. You need a supportive environment to grow. As James Clear says, “If your environment doesn’t change, you probably won’t either.”
Strong Attachment to our identities
It also needs a change in how you perceive yourself. If you are too attached to your unhealthy habits, so much so that your identity is associated by those habits, the transformation becomes even more difficult.
For example, even with the right intent to help your people, “I don’t express much” often stops people from showing up for their friends or partners. They are too attached to their non-expressiveness and may avoid participating in situations like heartbreak, failures, or funerals. This may be perceived as being rude and insensitive to others and affect your relationships negatively.
Same way, if you wear your obesity as a proud curvy identity, you may not be able to sustain fitness changes and a relapse to unhealthier habits will always be comforting. You can’t think like a fat person and get fitter. The fat person will allow you to cheat for that pizza and later give you the guilt.
Just a disclaimer here! There is nothing wrong if you don’t express much or are curvy. Non-expressiveness leading to not showing up for your closed ones is the core habit issue. If you are happy, healthy, and curvy, it’s perfect! But if you are curvy, unhealthy, and guilty, it doesn't help, right?
Thus, we need a combination of instant reward mechanisms with a sustainable long-term strategy and positive ways of labelling/identifying/perceiving ourselves.
This is where the Alter Ego Community Framework comes into play!
Alter Ego Community Framework for Habits Transformation
Step 1: Developing Intent
Our negative habit routines may seem like the only way to deal with the cue. That’s how it starts and becomes an instinct.
Question your habits and patterns often. Notice what’s not working.
Reflect on your day, week, and month, generally, regularly to identify negative patterns sooner.
Prepare a list of Moments of Impact or cues of your habit loop that trigger the undesired routine. Keep it handy. We’ll come back to it in Step 7.
You may not always have a solution at this point. Challenging a narrative engrained in our mindsets and accepting it is not helping is a great start in itself! We have just started!
Step 2: Discovering the root causes (Understanding our evolution and influences)
Several cultural, social, family and peer factors influence our habits.
Youngsters are made to believe that smoking and drinking are the only ways to look cool, make friends, and be included.
Lying seems the only way to avoid conflicts with an overprotective conservative family.
Reflect on all these influences.
Identify patterns and reasoning.
Step 3: Forgiveness and Self-Love:
Forgiving Others
When you have understood your evolution in the previous step, practice forgiveness. This helps you overcome blaming others for your negative habits and taking control to change your life.
It may seem very spiritual but how else do you change if you don’t control? And how do you control if you continue to let others drive your life?
Forgive others.
Self Forgiveness
An inevitable part of habit change is relapse.
You will go back to older negative habits. Know that it’s part of the process and that it’s okay. Don’t be harsh on yourself. If the same relapse is recurring, add it to your Cues/Moments of Impact List and we shall consider plans to tackle it. But giving up on yourself isn’t an option!
Practice more self-love.
Step 4: Discovering Self-Belief from good habits
Reflect on your strengths and your good habits. Use them to build self-belief and affirmations to counter every self-doubting thought with positive affirmations.
Understanding your strengths will also help you in clubbing new routines with your existing good habits to make the change easier for you.
For example, if you like reading books and are trying to overcome procrastination, you could try reading books about overcoming procrastination and being more productive. Same way, if you enjoy cooking and are trying to follow a diet, use your culinary skills to prepare healthier meals for yourself.
Step 5: Prioritization and Goal Setting
Most extrinsic goals are short-term goals and don’t help in the long run. For example. Losing weight for a particular occasion might help you short term but after the occasion, you will not have the motivation to do the habit. So dig deeper. Have a solid why and look for intrinsic long-term goals at first. We will then break this into smaller goals. But starting small without a vision of the extraordinary world may not help in consistency. Intrinsic motivators could be improved mental health, greater energy, self-love, and a sense of achievement.
What is your intrinsic motivation?
Why do you need this new habit?
How will it make you feel when you start doing this routine regularly?
Set SMART goals. Use goals-tracking and habit-tracking apps, reminders, and journals to track your progress.
As we discussed earlier, doing everything together seldom works so identify your top-most priorities to start with.
Micro habits
You could start with a couple of routines that seem the easiest to do. This helps build consistency and gives more confidence for the rest of the tasks. It could be drinking a glass of water when you wake up, or reading one page from a book daily. These activities are so small that our minds don’t resist them but eventually, these can compound to big changes soon.
1-3 Formula
The 1-3 formula helps you start a new habit around micro habits.
Step 1: Pick 1 SMART goal.
Step 2: Pick 3 daily micro habits that will take you to the goal.
Keystone Habit
Alternatively, you could also start with the most pivotal routine and build other habits around it. This is referred to as a “keystone habit” by James Clear and Charles Duhigg in their respective books.
Step 6:Crafting an Alter Ego
Who will achieve the above goals?
Crafting an alter ego is creating an alternate (good) identity powered by your strengths and intent discussed above but free of all self-doubts and insecurities. This visualization of a better self, giving it a name, defining its superpower, and creating a routine to activate it can help you show up instantly even if the reward is latent or delayed.
Say, wearing a smartwatch, tracksuit, and sports shoes instantly makes you feel more active. Do it all purposefully whenever you want to activate your active alter ego. Add as many details as you need. For example, a playlist of your favorite hype songs. Finding a gym buddy or trainer who pushes to show up. Plan and prepare beforehand, such as keeping your gym clothes ready at night, and asking your mom to wake you up at a desired time.
Step 7: New Perspectives, Values, and Mindset
What will be the action plan, mindset, and approach of your alter ego?
Does he like playing sports, working out in a gym, doing Pilates and Yoga?
We started by questioning our older habits and developing the intent to change. This is where we find the solutions. Explore different ideas and approaches. Reading, trying self-help programs, and participating in support group discussions give you new perspectives and ways of thinking.
What out of it suits your current strengths and fits your new identity? Keep what works best for you, discard the rest.
Take your Moments of Impact list from Step 1. Now, plan the response to each cue with all the knowledge of self and the new alter ego discovered so far. They say, writing it down is a problem half solved.
Step 8: Unleash your Alter Ego
It’s time to solve the half-solved problems entirely!
Unleash your alter ego. Practice the cue response list.
Our people are associated with our current identities and existing habits. The best way to practice your new behavior is in a stranger’s setting, say a cafe, a new sports academy, hobby clubs, or online communities. There are no preconceived notions or judgements from strangers. Even if there are, why should you care about stranger’s opinions?
At Alter Ego Community, we organize various hobbies-related meetups, volunteering day outs, and online and offline community discussions to provide a safe space to try out your new behaviors. Everyone here is a WIP and supports each other by playing different roles as needed from our 5Cs— Companion, Comfort, Consultant, Cheerleader, and Critic.
Step 9: Developing New Belief Systems
Why do we need belief systems for habit change?
So far, we have understood our roots, and planned mechanisms to overcome negative habit routines. What about the high-pressure situations that can’t be predicted?
By now, through steps 6-8, we have created a new identity, explored different approaches, and freed ourselves from limiting narratives. This is where we create our value systems and our mission in life that will guide our decision-making in future.
For the same reasons why mission, vision, and values are important for any organization. You may not have a defined process for every future decision but these belief systems guide all the future decision-making. It unites and aligns the different departments for the single goal to achieve the mission.
40% is habits and the rest is decision-making. Having a belief system insures your future decision-making and guides your thoughts and actions to align together to achieve all other goals in life.
Anticipating the Enemy
Just as important as it is to visualize our superpowers with an alter ego, it is equally important to vilify the ‘enemy’. Disgust it. Humiliate the enemy. Tell your pizza it can’t spoil your discipline! Tell your trauma, that you are greater than it and that it bogs you down.
It may appear childish. This is what experts call a response proclamation. Works just as a battle cry in war movies, the ‘hype’ before the coaches and captains create to make their teams more aggressive and focused to their goals.
Remember Virat Kohli’s iconic “60 overs of hell” speech?
You have done all the hard work, this is the final ground punch to counter your enemies.
Step 10: Integration of Alter Ego with Current Identities, the Becoming
With the new-found confidence and belief, you now expose your alter ego in the real world to complete the transformation.
We close the process with a commitment to continuous self-improvement.
Habits are a loop, not goals; it's the starting line of a lifelong marathon of learning, doing, and evolving into your absolute best. It's not about perfection but progress!
Keep evolving. Keep believing in your extraordinary!
Kamaal!