January 13, 2024

What are your good habits? List at least 3 and identify the cue that triggers the habit, the behavior, and the reward you get.

Laura Waltje
January 14, 2024

Hello friends,

In order to make the types of long term changes that will help us reach our goals, we need to change our habits or start adapting new ones. Over the next few days, we will examine our current habits and think about actionable ways to change them and implement new habits.

I first encountered the definition of habit as cue, routine/behavior, and reward when I read The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg for a class in college.

Cue triggers the behavior. Duhigg argues that most cues fall into these categories:
- Location
- Time
- Emotional State
- Other People
- Immediately preceding action

Routine/Behavior is the good or bad habit we are trying to identify.

Reward is the reason we keep coming back to this habit.

The example Duhigg gives in his book is his daily afternoon cookie. For his goal of loosing weight, he wants to cut out the cookie, but cold-turkey isn't working. The cue turns out to be the time of day. The routine/behavior he wants to change is getting up from his desk to get and eat a cookie. Initially he suspects sugar or the snack to be the reward, but he realizes the more important reward is actually the break and socializing that getting up to get the cookie resulted in.

We often think about what we need to change and what we want to do differently to reach our goals but today I would like us to focus on the positive and take a look at our good habits and why they work. I recommend taking the first third of however much time you are dedicating to writing today and listing out your good habits. Then take the final two thirds of your time to guess at the cue, behavior, and reward for each.

Take 5-15 minutes and write about

What are your good habits?

List at least 3 and identify the cue that triggers the habit, the behavior, and the reward you get.

Cue: Taking my meds

Behavior: Brushing Felix’s teeth

Reward: Seeing the plaque and tarter build-up reverse and having a less stinky dog

Cue: Finished eating dinner

Behavior: Doing my “one line a day” journal

Reward: Satisfaction

Cue: Seeing the empty bottles lined up next to the kitchen sink

Behavior: Refilling all of the water bottles with filtered water

Reward: Having nice fresh cold water

Cue: (inconsistent but either) first thing when I wake up after getting dressed or once I’ve had breakfast

Behavior: Writing and sending my daily journal prompt

Reward: Satisfaction

I notice that the two that are most inconsistent and that I forget most regularly are the ones that don’t have strong rewards, so it might be worth thinking about how I can change the reward to help me be more consistent. I am pretty motivated by food and have quite a sweet tooth. Since both of these habits are already naturally falling around meal times, maybe I can incorporate that by changing the reward of the olad journal to having some sort of little desert. (I’ve been making a lot of low-carb/keto ice cream lately with the ice cream maker my parents bought us as a wedding present, so that is definitely very rewarding.) For the writing prompt journaling in the morning, right now I’ve been inconsistent on whether I do it before or after breakfast. Perhaps I can switch the reward to breakfast. An obstacle to that can be that I make breakfast for other people and including posting the prompt and writing the contextualization in addition to actually replying to the prompt itself can take me quite a long time. To deal with that, on those days where I am responsible for breakfast for more people than just myself, I will skip the contextualization and posting and will just write my own journal entry before breakfast. At that point I feel confident that the unresolved feeling will be enough to motivate me to complete the other tasks after making and eating breakfast.

Habits by their very definition are unthinking behaviors. I hope that by examining them, we are able to leverage our existing habits and build new habits that serve us.

Your friend,
Laura