Your New Year’s resolution this year might not turn into a true “habit” — but that’s probably okay, according to Nir Eyal, best-selling author and behavioral design expert.
Eyal works with companies to create products that create habits – what helps patients take their medication on schedule or ask people to regularly use the product to learn a new language. He is also the author of “Indistractable: How to Take Control of Your Attention and Choose Your Life,” which focuses on how to break habits associated with distraction.
In Eyal’s mind, being able to use your attention is “the most important skill of the century,” but it’s not something we learn formally—which is also why it’s so important to understand.
The first step to not getting distracted in achieving your goals, including New Year’s resolutions? We need to know what can and cannot be a habit.
The difference between habit and routine
The problem, in Eyal’s eyes, is simple: We want to turn everything into a habit – without understanding the fundamental difference between a habit and a routine.
“The definition of a habit is an impulse to perform a behavior consciously or unconsciously,” Eyal said. “Most things that people want to make a habit of don’t become a habit.”
Meanwhile, their behavior is “a series of repetitive behaviors,” he added. “Finally, some routines can become habits, but not all routines can become habits.”
About 45% of our daily behaviors are habits, such as where we eat each day or how we get ready for bed. So, the logic goes, if we can just figure out how to “hack” our New Year’s resolution and turn it into a habit, we’ll be able to accomplish it without even thinking about it.
But habits are just that – instinctual, performed without thought and mostly subconscious. Accomplishing a new goal always takes effort, even if you do it regularly, like going to the gym or writing. “If the behavior is an effort, it cannot be a habit by definition,” said Eyal. “We need to stop telling people everything can become a habit. It can’t.”
Over time, there has been a broad cultural emphasis on the ease and importance of building habits, rather than routines, Eyal notes, and the issue is not just about semantics.
“What happens is people say, ‘Oh, I read this book … that tells me I can turn everything into a habit. It’s easy. It’s not on autopilot … but the book tells me I can use autopilot.’ ‘”
From there, the problem snowballs: Eyal said people then think “there must be something broken – not in the methodology, but in me … and they give up everything. And now, we leave them worse than when we started.”
Expect change to be hard
Rather than targeting habits, he argues that people should focus more on building routines, because, by definition, routines recognize the difficulty of changing patterns.
“If we tell people, ‘Look, some behaviors are going to be difficult – of course, if you do them right,'” says Eyal, it’s better than “teaching people that things can be easy,” which is subliminal. emphasis on habit.
Eyal adds that many people think that if they feel bad about the new behavior they are trying to develop, it is bad. “When you feel bad, you feel better,” he said. “Expect it to be difficult.”
“Many of these behaviors require us to make an effort,” he said. We shouldn’t think there’s a “magic formula” that can turn anything into a second-nature habit in just three steps, Eyal said. “Instead, it’s a tool to help you deal with the inevitable discomfort that will come with getting better.”
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