(Edited) Habits 101 Part 1 🧠
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Dear Heroes Digest,
Substack, the service we use to send out these posts was having technical difficulties today and sent out a draft version of today’s post, not the real post.
I apologize for the confusion and double email, but below you will find the actually Habits 101 post that was supposed to go out.
Thanks, Cody Isabel 👍🏻
TL;DR Summary:
3 Part Habit Series
What is Behavioral Change?
Start, Stop, More of, Less of, Continue
The Behavioral Change Process
Behavior Change & The Brain
The Magic of 63 Days
Part 2 & 3: Starts & Stops
Habits
Hello, I’ve been getting some cool requests recently on topics people want to learn about.
This week I will be starting a 3 parts series to cover a topic my dad, and many of you have asked about, habits.
In part 1 we will be defining what a habit is, and the process by which they are formed.
In parts 2 & 3 I will cover science-backed methods for creating & destroying habits that you can use in your life right away.
What Are Habits?
Let’s define some terms a habit is, “a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up.”
These habits wire themselves into our brains over time and become subconscious to us eventually.
For example, when was the last time you thought about your shower routine?
Do you shampoo first, then wash your body, or wash your body then shampoo?
What about your shoes and socks?
Are you a sock-sock, shoe-shoe type, or a sock-shoe, sock-shoe type of person?
You probably don’t think about this very often, if at all, because these are “habits” and having habits helps our brain save energy.
Making decisions is one of the most energetically expensive things our brains do, so limiting the number of conscious decisions it has to make is one of its top priorities!
95% of who we are, and what we do every day are driven by our habits, this is where the saying, “You are your habits” comes from.
Equation 1: You = Your Habits.
Habits & Behavioral Change
Now that we know what a habit is, let’s talk about changing them.
Since habits are subconscious, repeated actions or behaviors, changing a habit IS a behavioral change.
Equation 2: Habit Change = Behavioral Change.
So, how does behavioral change work? This is what we will spend the rest of Part 1 learning about.
I like to think of behavioral change in 5 ways. Starts, Stops, More of, Less of, and Continue.
These 5 categories are the most common ways we change our behaviors.
The two I’ve found to be the most challenging when working with people are Starts & Stops, which is what Parts 2 & 3 will be dedicated to them.
Think about it, when was the last time you tried to add a new habit or routine into your life like exercising, eating right, or sleeping better?
You can probably pretty easily bring some Stops to mind as well, like quitting smoking, overeating, or drinking.
Behavioral change is all around us, and more a part of our lives than we think!
If you want to change your habits, you need to understand behavioral change.
Lucky for you, it’s not as complicated as you might imagine. That doesn’t mean it’s easy by any means, but it can be broken down into roughly 5 Stages.
The 5 Stages of Behavioral Change
Most people who I work with have tried to change things before, but they didn’t understand the process they were walking into.
Becoming aware of the 5 Stages of Behavioral Change can give you a leg up when trying to change your behavior/habits.
The 5 Stages are:
Uninformed Optimism
Informed Pessimism
The Valley of Despair
Informed Optimism
Breakthrough
Let’s break each of these stages down using something we’re all familiar with, getting to the gym/working out!
Every January 2nd, gyms across the country are full of people in the Uninformed Optimism stage.
This is the stage where you have no clue how hard what you’re about to do is going to be, so you naively believe it’s going to be easy.
Even if you’ve tried to start working out before and failed, you know that this time it will be different!
This brings us to the middle of January, you’re now crossing over the pessimism line, and have entered stage 2, Informed Pessimism.
This is the “Oh Shit” moment when you realize this is going to be a lot harder than you first thought.
You’ve lost your initial momentum, and this is where some of those doubts come in… “Can I really do this?”
The Valley of Despair
This leads us to February 2nd, and stage 3, the Valley of Despair.
This is the breaking point for most people and the breakthrough point for a few.
For those who don’t escape the Valley of Despair and quit the journey, you can rest assured, that next January they’ll be back, just as Uninformed and Optimistic as before, but sure “it will be different this time…”
I will let you in on a little secret. It will not be different. The cycle will repeat, and if you can’t ever beat the Valley of Despair you’ll stay stuck in a loop going from Stage 1 to 3 over and over in a circle.
Some people stay in this cycle for the majority of their lives, never escaping this loop.
For the few who survive the Valley of Dispair, greener pastures of upon them, they’ve made it to Stage 4, Informed Optimism.
This is the second wind, this is the moment you realize, this is hard as hell, but I’ve got it! I can do this!
You’re headed back up into the optimism section emotionally, and it’s just a matter of time until you hit Stage 5, which is Success/Breakthrough.
You’ve climbed the mountain, and created a habit, at this point your brain is on your team!
Speaking of your brain, what does it have to do with these stages?
The Brain & Behavioral Change
As you know by now from reading my posts, neurons that fire together, wire together. This is exactly what is happening during behavioral change.
Behavioral change is the basis of “Neuroplasticity” which is a fancy way of saying that when your behaviors change, your brain changes to reflect those changes.
Equation 3: Behavioral Change = Neuroplasticity
This is the Neurological process behind how your habits create “you.”
As you change your behaviors, new neural pathways are being created.
Imagine creating a path through a forest.
You need to clear a path first, then create a dirt road, then maybe gravel, then cement, until eventually, you have a superhighway through the forest.
This is analogous to what’s happening in your brain as you create new behaviors/habits.
When you’re changing an old behavior something else is also happening as well however, the superhighway of nerve connections of the behavior you’re changing is also dying.
This is what makes behavioral change so hard, you are pulling apart nerve connections, or deconstruction the highway through the forest.
It takes time to break apart the cement, clear out the debris, lay down healthy dirt, and plant new things in it.
This is happening in your brain. Neural connections are being torn apart and uprooted in your brain.
Why Behavioral Change “Hurts”
Just like getting a paper cut hurts because you’re killing cells in your finger, destroying neural connections with new behaviors hurts as well, ie The Valley of Dispair!
These changes in our nerve connections are even measurable. We can see in brain scans new systems of neurons growing together as they are fire and wired together during behavioral change.
The more neurons that grow together, the larger the neural network becomes, and as we’ve talked about, the more nerves that wire together in our brains, the easier and easier it becomes to fire them.
The easier and easier it becomes to fire them, the more and more subconscious they become until they’re just like your shower routine.
This is a superpower when used correctly, this means you have the power to change, “who you are” through behavioral change.
Equation 4: Neuroplasticity = New “You”
This process of neural change can be mapped right to the 5 Stages we talked about above, and it takes 63 Days.
The Magic of 63 Days
There has been more and more research coming out about habit creation and destruction in the last few years.
Some of the most profound research has found that it takes about 63-84 days for your neurons to rewire themselves into a new neural pathway.
We can map this neural growth/change to the 5 Stages of Behavioral Change.
During Stage 1 roughly days 1-14 of the 63 Days, your informed optimism keeps you going as new neural connections start to form.
If you could see these nerves as they start to wire together, you would only see cell bodies at this point.
They look like little seeds of a tree with baby sprouts sticking out of them.
Towards the middle of the second week of Stage 1, your optimism starts to wane, and Stage 2 is about to begin.
Moving into Stage 2, informed pessimism, which is from roughly day 15-21 your nerves are starting to wire together with the cells near them that you have been wiring and firing together.
The cells that represent the old pattern in your brain are being pulled apart and die as you build your new superhighway.
It’s been suggested that this is why the pessimism begins. Your cells want to survive, so as you start to unwire them, they resist.
This is where the negative thoughts and crappy feelings come from, it’s your old neural pathways begging you to stop killing them!
The Resistance
This resistance is what you feel as “pessimism”, and what makes it hard to keep going as we turn the corner on Stage 3.
By Stage 3, the Valley of Despair, roughly days 22-42, your new neural connections have wired themselves into a new neural circuit, meaning you now have a paved road.
At this point, you have about as many neurons wired together for your old behavior as you do for your new behavior, this is what makes the Valley of Despair so hard.
It’s like a war inside your brain to see which path will win, and be reinforced long-term.
Your old behavioral pattern has a home-field advantage too.
It has more Dopamine on its side, making it more enticing of an option. It’s also typically lower activation energy as well.
Meaning it takes less energy to sit on your couch and watch TV than it does to go workout.
All of these things combine to create the Valley of Despair inside of our brains.
This is why so few make it past this Stage and start back over at Stage 1 again.
Why Quitting Doesn’t Help
The reason why this entire journey will start back over for them again is that once they quit and go to start back over again at Stage 1, the new neural pathways they’ve been building, shrivel up.
This means they’re starting back at square 1 neuronally as well, and will have to fight through the same Valley in their next go around because they still trying to create a new neural pathway.
For those who do make it to Stage 4, which is roughly days 43-63, their new neural pathways have exploded, and have now surpassed the old behavioral pathway.
This is where the uptick in optimism and motivation comes in, and why Stage 4 is called informed optimism!
As we move into Stage 5, which is days 64-84, your brain cells have created a massive network of neurons that resemble a forest, and your new superhighway is complete.
By this time, you’ve created a subconscious pathway in your brain, by now it’s starting to just feel like routine, and the voice inside your head stops arguing with you so much!
This is the reason all Rewrite & Rise programs are over 63-84 days.
Bringing it All Together
This is the Neuroscience of behavioral change, which as you now know is habit change.
Understanding this foundation is key to starting new things, breaking old habits, and being one of the few who takes control of their life.
I hope it also excites you to understand how much power you have over your life and outcomes.
You can change “you” through this process. By understanding this process you are not helpless anymore.
Let’s bring our 4 equations together to prove it:
Equation 1: You = Your Habits.
Equation 2: Habit Change = Behavioral Change
Equation 3: Behavioral Change = Neuroplasticity
Equation 4: Neuroplasticity = New “You”
By looking at these equations, you can see why mastering the process of habit creation and destruction is so important.
Your Mind gives you the power to think, feel and choose.
Consciously determining which choices you’d like to make or not make is the first step in behavioral change!
And as you know now, behavioral change is the process of creating a new “you” through neuroplasticity!
Understanding the process is step 1, but the journey through the process is the next step.
In parts 2 & 3 we will dive deep into Habit creation and destruction.
I hope you enjoyed today’s post, if you did, please share it on social media with your biggest takeaway, we would love to grow the Heroes Digest community!
Thank you, and until next time, live Heroically.