David R. MacIver's Blog
The Habit Cycle
This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/the-habit-cycle.
Hi everyone,
I’m a day late with this newsletter, so it seems only fair that I talk about debugging failing habits (I don’t think this is one of them yet, I just didn’t get around to writing it on Tuesday and then on Wednesday was running on something in the region of two hours sleep so had no writing capability available).
A thing I have often noticed is that I am very bad at maintaining habits. I do things for a while, they go great, I’m very enthusiastic about them to the point of practically becoming an advocate for them, and then at some point I don’t want to do them, drop them, and feel bad about it.
This is, as you can imagine, quite frustrating, especially when everything I said in the advocacy was true: Often these are great habits which were bringing a lot of benefit to my life, and yet I drop them and I can’t bring myself to do them any more and I lose those benefits.
For example, I’m a morning pages advocate. It’s practically my thing at the moment - most of my coaching clients have started morning pages because of me. Also to a very large degree I have stopped doing morning pages in the last month or two. I did some debugging about this on Twitter a few weeks back, and this produced some interesting ideas but didn’t result in much success in fixing the habit.
::: {.twitter-embed attrs=“{”url”:“https://twitter.com/DRMacIver/status/1339881184562700288”,“full_text”:“Right, lets do some debugging in public to illustrate this a bit.\n\nMy morning pages habit has totally fallen apart in the last week or two. I’ve been a little in denial about that but I’ve skipped three days in a row of morning pages, so it’s time to sort this out.”,“username”:“DRMacIver”,“name”:“David R. MacIver”,“profile_image_url”:““,”date”:“Fri Dec 18 10:32:22 +0000 2020”,“photos”:[],“quoted_tweet”:{“full_text”:“A theme that keeps coming up in the coaching I’m doing is \”It sounds like you’re trying to do the thing in a way that doesn’t work for you. You know you’re allowed to change it so that it does instead of just suffering through it, right?\““,”username”:“DRMacIver”,“name”:“David R. MacIver”},“reply_count”:0,“retweet_count”:1,“like_count”:6,“impression_count”:0,“expanded_url”:{},“video_url”:null,“belowTheFold”:false}” component-name=“Twitter2ToDOM”} :::
Since writing that thread, I’ve come to view the problem through a lens of costs and benefits.
Cost-benefit analysis is often a really useful lens on human behaviour: Actions have benefits (good stuff) and costs (bad stuff) and people choose what to do based on the difference between the two. This view is entirely wrong, but often useful.
I think very often habits fail because the cost-benefit analysis changes: A habit that was once worth it no longer is. In this view, dropping the habit is actually entirely the rational thing to do, and there’s no reason to feel bad about it.
(This is potentially quite a self serving explanation and it’s not one you should adopt as definitively true, but it’s worth bearing in mind that it’s possible that it is true).
This seems like a weird way to explain a pattern of habits failing, but actually I think there are quite robust reasons that you should expect some costs to go up and some benefits to go down for most habits.
(there are also reasons to expect costs to go down and benefits to go up for most habits, and which ones dominate will vary from habit to habit)
The most obvious one of these is that I think there’s an explore/exploit trade off. Early on in a habit you’re in explore mode, so it’s reasonable to value the habit based on how good it could be, but once you’re in exploit mode you’re valuing it based on how good it actually is - you’ve learned fairly accurately what the benefits are and how much effort it takes, and so your estimate of how good the habit could be long term is now more accurate, and it’s not really worth it at that price point. This can happen with costs too - something can be annoying but you’re willing to put up with it to see if it gets less annoying, but then it doesn’t.
But I think as well as our knowledge of the habits getting better, sometimes the habits actually do get worse. Reasons for this include:
Early on in a habit, the habit has a novelty value. You’re learning and trying new things, and that’s fun and useful. Once you’ve exhausted the novelty of the habit you’re no longer getting that and so the benefit goes down. I think there’s definitely an element of this with morning pages for me.
If the habit is solving some problem for you, you may well pick all of the low-hanging fruit pretty quickly. e.g. I had this with my daily writing practice, where the initial goal was to get a whole bunch of stuff that was bumbling around in my head into writing, and then I did all that and writing became much harder because I had to work more to find things I wanted to write about. Again, the benefit goes down.
Often habits are started during a high energy period and dropped in a low energy period, so the cost doesn’t exactly go up, but the cost relative to you budget goes up. I definitely find this with e.g. exercise or social habits.
Often habits are in some way creating “debt” that builds up over time - e.g. taking up a time slot you would use for other things - and that gets progressively more apparent the longer the habit goes on.
Often the fact of a habit failing itself creates increased cost, because we acquire an ugh field around the habit as something we “should” be doing and feel guilty for not (this is cleaning and other maintenance habits for me).
Of course, habits can get better over time too: You can learn to get better at them, lowering the cost, and you can figure out useful ways to use them, raising the benefit. It seems like maybe the habits that fail are the ones that don’t do this, and that if we have a habit we particularly want to retain we should treat the failure of the habit as a sign that we need to figure out a way to make it do this (cf. Don’t just try harder).
This suggests a model where when habits start to fail, rather than worry about it we should just assess whether either maybe we should let them, or we should make them better for us in some way.
One way to do that would be to embrace the novelty and switch to a different habit that retains some of the strengths of the old ones but lets you explore it from a different angle. e.g. I’ve not resumed morning pages, but I’ve started a Google doc with a beeminder word for a word count and a more narrow focus on personal development (inspired by How To Beemind Nebulous Goals), and that seems to be working for me for the moment. This helps shift the cost-benefit analysis in morning pages a little bit by focusing on the best part of them and removing some of the irritations (no more hand writing, more focus on the good bits). We’ll see if that’s enough, and if not I’ll try something else.