Your New Year’s resolutions this year may never become a real “habit” – but that could be fine, according to Nir Eyala bestselling author and behavioral design expert.
Eyal works with companies to build habit-forming products — whether it’s helping patients take their medication on schedule or get people to regularly use a product to learn a new language. He is also the author of “Indistinguishable: How to control your attention and life choices,” focuses on how we break the habits associated with distraction.
In Eyal’s mind, the ability to grab your attention is “the most important skill of the century,” but it’s not something we learn formally – it’s also what makes understanding better. become important.
The first step to less distraction in the pursuit of our goals, including New Year’s resolutions? We need to understand what can and can’t become a habit.
The difference between habit and habit
The trouble, in Eyal’s eyes, is simple: We want to make things a habit — without understanding the fundamental difference between habit and habit.
“The definition of a habit is the impulse to perform a behavior with little or no conscious thought,” says Eyal. “Most of the things that people want to make into a habit will never become a habit.”
Meanwhile, a habit is “a series of behaviors that are repeated frequently,” he added. “Ultimately, some habits can become habits, but not all habits can become habits.”
About 45% of our daily behavior is habit, such as where we dine every day or how we prepare for bed. So logically, if we can figure out how to “hack” our New Year’s goals and make them a habit, we’ll accomplish them without even thinking about it.
But habits are just that – instinctively, done without thought and largely subconsciously. Accomplishing a new goal always takes some effort, even if it’s something you do regularly, like exercising or writing. Eyal says: “If a behavior takes effort, it cannot, by its definition, be a habit. “We need to stop telling people that everything can become a habit. Impossible.”
Meanwhile, there is a wide culture emphasizes ease and importance of habit buildingrather than habit, Eyal notes, and the problem is not merely a matter of semantics.
“What happens is people say, ‘Oh, I read this book… the book told me I could make things a habit. And then, after a month or two, they look back and said, ‘Wait a minute. This isn’t easy. This isn’t on autopilot… but the book told me this is something I can put on autopilot.'”
From there, the problem became a snowball: Eyal says people then think “there must be something wrong – not with the methodology, but with me… and so they completely And now, we’re making it harder for them than when we started.”
Expect tough changes
Instead of targeting habits, he says people should focus more on building habits, because habits by definition acknowledge the difficulty of changing patterns.
“If we say to people, ‘Look, some behaviors are going to be difficult – always, if you’re doing them the right way,'” says Eyal, that’s better than “teaching people that everything can be somehow easy”, which is the sublime emphasis on habit.
Eyal adds that many people assume that when they feel bad about a new behavior they’re trying to develop, it’s inherently a bad thing. “If you feel bad, you get better,” he says. “Hopefully it will be difficult.”
“Many of these behaviors require effort from us,” he continued. We shouldn’t think there’s a “miracle recipe” that can turn anything into a second, natural habit in just three steps, Eyal says. “Instead, these are tools to help you deal with the inevitable discomfort that will come from getting better at something.”
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