[Grace Beverly] The Habit Theory That Changed My Life, Explained

What is up? And welcome to Working Hard, Hardly Working. For those of you who might not have listened to the podcast before, when I started this, I wanted it to be all about curating stories from a range of guests. But this year, we're not just levelling up the guests. We're revamping the solo episodes too. I have a nerdy obsession with knowing more about random things and theories, so I've given myself an excuse to spend hours researching the topics I wish I knew more about. Let's get into today's topic, the habit theory that changed mine and probably everyone you've seen on Instagram's life. First of all, let's talk about the context of habit theory. What activities do you do every day without fail? You might start thinking of the obvious, brushing your teeth, drinking water, eating lunch.

Maybe you're thinking about the habits that you want to break, like checking social media in the evenings or snoozing your alarm. Whilst these small habits may not seem like they make much of a difference to your day, if you want to make a change in your life, it is these small daily actions, not the big changes, that make a difference. Habit theory has been around for decades decades, but it's really exploded in recent years. Most of this can be pinned to a game changing book by James Clear titled Atomic Habits. You've probably heard of it before. In the book, James Clear says that your identity is quite literally made up of your actions. So you're defined by what you do. So if you want to change your identity to, say, become more successful or productive or to be a better friend, it's easy, but it's not just a shift in your mindset.

You need to distill it into daily actions. Claire's idea that a lack of clarity is often mistaken for a lack of motivation. And that most of the time, the reason we fail to reach our goals isn't because we can't be bothered but because we haven't turned our goals into achievable, trackable habits. My favorite quote from the book is, you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Goal setting means absolutely nothing if there's no system related to it that will help you actually achieve that goal. A goal is a wish without a system, basically. There's decades of science behind Clear's theory, so let's get into the actual data.

Studies have shown that up to 43% of our daily actions are habits. So it makes sense that shifting them would have a huge impact on your life. The idea behind Clear's theory is very simple, and the headline is that you've got to focus on shifting your habits so you're getting 1% better every day. Improving by 1% sometimes isn't even noticeable. But here's the maths. If you can get 1% better each day for 1 year, you'll end up 37 times better by the time you're done. This doesn't sound like a lot. However, 37 times better is not 37% better.

It's 3,700 percent better because of exponential growth. To give an example of this, if you started the year with a £100 and you were able to increase that by 1% every day, by the end of the year, you would have £3,778. So you wouldn't just have £100 plus £365 because of the exponential growth. This is how much your life can improve. Conversely, if you get 1% worse each day for 1 year, you'll decline nearly down to 0. So what starts as a small win or, on the other hand, a minor setback can actually accumulate into something much, much more. And this is backed up by business studies too. According to a study conducted by the Harvard Business Review, companies that integrate small, consistent improvements into their daily operations are 30% more likely to see substantial growth over time.

So it's not just something for your routine but to apply to every element of your life and work. Start thinking about this every day in everything you're doing, whether it is a skill, whether it is a habit. I promise you, it will change your whole perception. There is a lot of psychology behind this. And in order to understand it, we need to understand the habit loop. In the 19 nineties, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology decoded the structure of habits. They coined the idea of a habit loop to describe the neurological patterns that are the basis of all of our routines. The loop consists of 4 parts.

Cue, craving, response, and reward. Let's go through each stage together. Number 1. This is the cue. The cue is what triggers your brain to initiate a habit. If you think of your brain like a sniffer dog that's always searching for a dopamine hit, the cue is its first whiff of reward. This could be a primary reward linked to a survival instinct like food or water or it could be a secondary reward we've evolved to want like money, power, fame, approval, love, or satisfaction. Number 2 is the craving.

If your cue is your first hint that you could get a reward, the craving is the natural response to that hint. James Clear puts it brilliantly when he says that cravings are the motivational force behind every habit. So without some sort of motivation, we wouldn't have any reason to do any action. And what we crave isn't the habit, but the reward that habit delivers. A good example of this is you don't want to switch the light on. You want to be able to see in the dark. So you're not motivated by turning on the TV, but the promise of entertainment wants you do. Your specific thoughts, feelings, and emotions are what transform a cue into a craving.

So if you're a smoker, smelling a cigarette might be a cue to light one. However, if you're not, it could be a cue to move away because you don't want to smell the smoke. Number 3 is your response. So the response is the actual habit, like, the action itself. Clear points out that whether a response occurs depends on how motivated you are and how much friction is associated with the behavior. If a particular action requires more physical or mental effort than you are willing to expend, then you won't do it. Your response also depends on your ability. So brushing your teeth might be easy.

But if you want to put away your shopping in a high cupboard but you're not tall enough, then you're more likely not to do it. This explains to me why I don't wanna go on a run. And finally, what it was all for, the reward. The reward is really what makes the habit loop go round. Claire puts it like this. The cue is about noticing the reward. The craving is about wanting the reward. The response is about obtaining the reward.

Think of your brain as a reward detector. It's always monitoring and bookmarking the actions that give you rewards so that it can repeat them again and again and again. And the more immediate that reward, the more likely your brain will be to repeat that action. So take eating chocolate for an example. This is an action that will give most of us an immediate dopamine hit. Compare that to cooking a long and healthy recipe, and you quickly realize why so many of us find it hard to have a balanced diet. The psychology of the reward is also why we have tick boxes next to every item in the TPM planner. The more satisfying you can make finishing a task, the more you can make finishing a task, the more likely you are to both do it and repeat it.

Now this is really interesting because it explained to me why I feel really shit when I get the end of the day if I didn't have a plan or a to do list for that day in comparison to if the day before I had done exactly the same amount but had had a plan or to do list. We are wired to want that dopamine hit. So if we're gonna do a task, we want to know we've achieved that task. We want to be able to literally tick it off. All these 4 steps in the habit loop are essential for making or breaking any habit. So without the first three steps, a behavior will not occur. Without all 4, a behavior will not be repeated. So once you know about how this system works, you can hack it to create the right habits and break the wrong habits that align with the person that you want to be.

To create a good habit, you need to make the cue obvious. Make the craving attractive. Make the response easy and make the reward satisfying. And to break a bad habit, you need to make the cue invisible, make the craving unattractive, make the response difficult, and make the reward unsatisfying. So I'm gonna give an example of both a habit to make and a habit to break. If I wanted to make a habit of working out in the morning, I would make my cue obvious. I would leave out my workout clothes the night before. I would make the craving attractive.

So I would do something to make that workout easier, like making sure that I had a gym membership I was happy with, getting myself a Peloton if I was feeling super generous, or getting myself some nice active wear, obviously, from Tara. You'd make the response easy. How are you gonna make that workout easy? You're gonna have a set workout plan. You're You're going to know exactly what you're doing. You haven't just left your active wear out. You also know today I am doing Pilates class 102. And then you make the reward satisfying. On a smaller level, that is ticking it off.

On a bigger level, that could be once I've done 6 weeks of this, I'm gonna buy myself some headphones like I literally did last week. I made the reward satisfying. Let's talk about the break side. So for example, say I wanted to break a smoking habit. So to make the cue invisible. I'm obviously not buying any cigarettes. And any I already have, I'm getting someone to hide or throw away. I'd make the craving unattractive.

Obviously, with something like smoking, this is hard to explain because the craving's gonna be attractive because usually there's an element of addiction behind it. But how about a nicotine pad? So you're making the craving less attractive because you're not actually craving it as much because you are getting that hit from elsewhere. You're making the response difficult. You've already made it relatively difficult by hiding or throwing away. You're not buying any more cigarettes. But on top of that, maybe you don't go past the shop on the way home where you usually buy cigarettes. And you can make the reward unsatisfying by maybe having an accountability partner, and you have to tell that person every single time you actually smoke. So you feel shit letting them down.

These are just two examples. Obviously, you can apply this to any area of your life in order to make or break the habit loop. As part of these new solo episodes, I really wanted to talk to the experts themselves. I have a voice note from Nir Eyal who wrote the book that really put habit theory into the mainstream.

My name is Nir Eyal, and I'm a behavioral designer. So I help companies build the kind of products that build healthy habits in users' lives. And I also help people break bad habits like those associated with distraction. So the most surprising thing about habits is just how much of our day to day lives are guided by these behaviors done with little or no conscious thought, these habits. About half of what you do every day, day in and out is is motivated in some part through habit. Now that's surprising, but I would also caution that not every behavior can become a habit. So it's very important to know the difference between a habit and a routine. The one thing I wish everyone knew about habits is that not every behavior can become a habit.

When you hear people talking about how they wanna create a habit, really what they're saying is they don't like doing something, and they wish they could have some magic autopilot button to turn it into a habit. Now that can work with certain behaviors, behaviors that meet the very definition of a habit. A habit is defined as a behavior done with little or no conscious thought. So certain behaviors you can absolutely turn into a habit. Think about the first time you learn to drive a car. When you first learned, it was probably white knuckling it the whole time. But as you got more comfortable and that behavior turned to a habit, you can have a conversation someone while you're driving. You can listen to an audio recording, the radio, a podcast, all while you're driving out of habit.

But some behaviors cannot and will never become habits. Those behaviors we call routines. Unlike a habit, which is a behavior done with little or no conscious thought, a routine is just a series of behaviors frequently repeated. But for behaviors that will never become habits, we need what's called deliberate practice. So habits requires you to do something effortlessly. Routines require you to do behavior by leaning into the discomfort, by doing something that's difficult. That's how you become somebody who can repeat a behavior with a routine. The problem is when people get their wires crossed, they wake up one day and they say, oh, this behavior is still hard.

It's still difficult. I still don't like it. There's no autopilot here. And they think that they did something wrong, so they quit altogether. And so it's really important to understand what behaviors can become habits and which will never become habits.

God. I find this whole thing so interesting and hearing from him is a real privilege on this. So now you know about the theory, you can second guess your own habit loop. For example, you could turn off your social media notifications to silence your queues to check it a 100 times a day. Or you could allow yourself to watch Netflix once you've stacked your dishwasher, making the reward for that habit more satisfying. The most useful time to think about your loop is when you're goal setting. So let's say you want to do 10,000 steps every day, think about how you can optimize the habit loop for that action. What's your cue to do it? Are you going to walk at a specific time every day? How will you make it an easy action to do? What reward will you give yourself after you've hit that target? These are the systems that I use every time I set a goal because they're science backed.

Whether that is a goal in business or in my personal life, you need to break down every single goal into habits and then track them every day. It sounds both overly simple and also a huge faff but it is literally the basics of achieving anything. Remember that goal setting episode we did at the beginning of the year? Say you've set these amazing goals. You feel really excited about them. You have this dopamine hit because you feel excited about like, I'm gonna do this this and this this year. How great is this gonna be next year when I get to this point when I'm like, I've done all of these things. Those goals will never ever ever come true if you have not integrated them into your every day. If you haven't built a habit loop based on them.

So why not look back at the goals you set at that point, look at the top three ones, and break them into a habit loop? What is gonna be your habit loop for that specific goal? Then when we're taking that into the kind of atomic habit theory, that is when we start to see how important it is not just to have these habit loops to know how to make and break habits, but when we zoom out a little bit more from that, how we make sure that we are getting 1% better every single day. It's not as easy as it sounds but it's also not as hard as it sounds. 1%. 1% better. You can do that. And the way you can do that is by making sure that the habits you are doing every single day are exactly aligned with the overall goals you set. It's not about setting the goals. It's not about the big picture.

It's about how you break that down into the everyday is what's going to determine whether you reach those goals or not. So I hope you really enjoyed learning more about habit theory. I feel like I need a reset on it every few months because when it's at the forefront of my brain, I'm so much more productive and I feel like I'm so much closer to the person I want to be, the goals I want to reach. I fully believe in goals being wishes until you genuinely have a plan. And this this is the theory I can get behind. And when I was doing some of my reading on it and just refreshing to make sure that I am actually getting 1% better every single day, I was just thinking. I was like I'm so glad I know about this and I feel like it's the type of thing that everyone sees everywhere. Everyone sees Atomic Habits.

Everyone sees Habit Theory. And everyone's like, yeah. But if you don't know about it, you should know about it. And this is why I wanted to do just like an in-depth explainer so that we can all actually get 1% better every day. If you wanna do some more reading up on the subject because I've really only scratched the surface here, I've included a reading list in the notes below. So that is your whistle stop tour and habits theory. Let me know how you are going to implementing it into your life. And also please let me know what you think of these new explainer episodes.

I'm the type of person. I don't wanna start something or try something if I don't know if it's really gonna work. But I feel like I listen to explainer episodes on celebrity drama, on, like, big things that have happened, on the news, on whatever it might be. And the things I really wanna hear about are these things, like, the life improvement things. I wanna know deep dives into things like the beauty myth, why we're so obsessed with life improvement, why the world makes women poorer. All of these types of things I would love to do deep dive episodes on. Let me know if that's the type of thing you would be interested in. I wanted to try this new setup by just recording one episode.

Let me know what you think. You can tell me you hate it. I personally absolutely loved preparing for this episode. And as I said, I feel like life improvement isn't just about the things like habits. It's about being a better person by knowing more things about the world and being more interesting and being able to hold better conversation and talk to people about things that aren't just other people. And that's why I'm so passionate about this type of thing in case you cannot tell. So I hope you really enjoyed this episode. If you did, please like and subscribe, and I will see you in the next one.