Eating all the cookies

by Anne White

There have been a lot of popular habit-themed books written in recent years, and one of them is Tiny Habits, by B. J. Fogg, Here are my takeaways from it: 

If you want to increase your chances of cementing or continuing a habit, you have to make it easier OR give the person a stronger motivation for doing it.

If you want to break one, you have to make the thing more difficult OR change their motivation. 

Fogg doesn't talk about Frog, Toad, and their difficulty in not eating cookies (in Frog and Toad Together), but that story comes close to what he's saying. By putting the box up on a shelf, they did make it more difficult to get at them, but they still had a strong motivation to eat the cookies, so it didn't work very well. Still, changing just one of those factors makes it more likely that you will change the habit, one way or another. 

Another example is something my husband mentioned: that people aren't giving blood as much these days, and the blood-donation places are wondering why. One reason may be that workplaces used to make blood donation super-easy, having clinics on site or giving people time off to go to them. Since people's internal motivation to donate blood can be very low or mixed (they know it's a good thing to do, but it might hurt), that's something that you have to counteract by making it as easy and painless as possible for them to do so. We're not describing a habit here, but it's the same sort of problem where, to see an action happen more often or more regularly, you have to make it easier to people to buy into it. Or harder for them not to.

B. J. Fogg claims that it is NOT necessary to do something for a month or a certain number of times in order for it to become a habit: the factors that really count in forming a habit are things like motivation and ease of doing the action. He offers the example of a young person who is given a smart phone which is immediately glued to them. There are certain habits we can pick up very quickly, but also some that we can drop just as quickly.

Charlotte Mason makes a great deal of the power of habit, and we usually focus on the word "habit" there, but I think we should emphasize the word "power" just as much. And this "power" is something that we can have over ourselves, if we have the right tools. One tool is the power of association, or what we might now call "triggers." The interesting power of recognizing "triggers" is that they can be turned on their heads. To break a habit, you need to purposefully change what that trigger tells you to do. I think it was in Fogg's book that I saw this example:. A woman was going through a bitter divorce, and every time she had to meet with her husband he would say nasty things. She created a cunning plan in which she gave herself little rewards (like watching an episode of her favourite show) based on how many whammies he threw at her. Sounds very odd, but for her it created a new sense of delight rather than resentment; the trigger of an insult gave her something to look forward to, rather than the urge to retaliate. (Disclaimer: this example is not meant to reflect on anyone's marital experience or to minimalize the pain of interpersonal conflict, it's just something that apparently worked for one person.)

Another part of the power of habits is our ability to chain them together--and many of us have seen this as we train children to go through a morning routine, where  they comb their hair, then brush their teeth, then make their bed. One action triggers the next. If we already have one good habit fixed in place, we can more easily load a bonus habit on top of it.

Which is, perhaps, a whole new side of the idea that "education is the science of relations."

What do you think?