How to master habits?

Good habit make time your ally, bad habit make it your enemy – James Clear

Have you ever wished to master a habit? And when I say master I am not into “the 5 ways to” or a “how to guide” what every other blogs talk about. Besides, what I actually means is to have control over ‘em – like you have on your children, not exactly them, but like you have over your employees(never!! if one of ‘em is like me – cold rebellion).

To control habit means to gain this power where you can detach or attach yourself effortlessly from a habit. I know that’s tough, I know we have given up trying taking up reading 10 pages each day more than 10 times.

And there are several habits like these which we want to break or make. And what if we could control them as per our will…..what if…..what if….?!!!

The Super Power

Controlling habit means to either let go of the bad one or adopting the great ones. Like you are now in charge at the gateway of your system as a sovereign.

How good it would be if we could control everything in our life. However that’s a human tendency to have this desire to control anything we bump into say it our time, money, peeps in life, our girlfriend tantrums etcetera.

But controlling habit is what I say is one of the superpower as a human we can have. Since it ultimately gives us freedom over time and self-development.

When habits itself make us feel under control. And for a while just think “what if. What if we could control them at the first place. What if we could learn to let go of bad one and developing the good one effortlessly”.

When we struggle to keep up morning running, exercise, meditation, reading, hitting gym etc. & let go of the bad one such as smoking, drinking, dead-scrolling the insta etc. this art really sounds a kind of superpower.

And believe me breaking a bad habit is much tougher than building a one. And incase you just learnt how to break a one you will eventually built enough space and confidence to build a good one.

To make it possible we first need to learn the science behind. Science behind this superpower, science – to become a superhuman.

The 16 minutes rule!

I wanna make you time travel back in 1980s. This isn’t some fable but an experiment in order to figure out a concept.

So back in 1980s when the moving floor to floor was made easier with the invention of what we today known as elevators. Some scientist tried to convince people to use stairs instead. But why would they do that? when at the first place technology reduce our efforts.

So they did what most of us would have thought of – they started to convince people.

They put up signs : “Its good to take the stairs”, “Its good for your health”, “Its f*cking bad to take the elevator”, “Waste energy!!” and so on.

But these all efforts had no effect! Certainly they were habitual enough to do it.

Now it was not researchers against humans but it was their knowledge against habit.

Nevertheless, these researchers were so creative so they decided to try a unique approach. What they did was to slow down the closing of the elevator door by 16 seconds.

And that worked!! This worked its magic enough to put enough resistance on people to use elevators. Every time they use elevator, its door didn’t respond immediately though it delayed by 16 seconds every time before closing.

And this alone reduced the elevator use by a third. Magic!!

What’s the most wonderful thing about this study is when they put the elevator door back to its original speed, people kept taking the stairs since they had formed this another habit to take the stairs so they just stuck with it.

Thus psychologist has a term for this phenomenon called friction : barrier to performing a behavior**.**

Dad, Friction is f*cking awesome!

Well, friction is something like that, it is our old school concept most of us have studies about. And it does not sound creepy instead it is really awesome when it comes on controlling your habits.

And in this section I’m gonna tell you why!

If you won’t make it easier over time, you won’t do it for longer.

Friction is really important in determining what behavior we repeat so what behaviors become a habit.

When we applied this old school concept on human behavior, it gave two perspectives. If you want to break a habit, put some friction & to make one – eliminate it as much as possible.

Moreover, This friction in itself is a function of 3 parameters. You can use any one of them or all of these function together in order to control habits.

f(friction) = f(time, distance, effort)

Time

In this experiment, researchers used time as a function of friction by delaying door closing time by 16 seconds.

But this is one of the example. The point is we can either reduce or raise this so called factor time. Lets say you want to start doing exercise at your home. Then just start with as little as with a 10mins of session. Then do it continuously for initial days until you really feel confident to go for longer sessions and then increase this time gradually to 30mins to an hour.

By starting small you are familiarizing yourself with something new and as you repeat this behavior, every single day, you are habitualizing yourself with this activity until it really sticks with you. Then you can make as many modification as you want without the fear of losing the streaks.

And just like time there are other 2 factors as well which you can use as a friction tool such as distance & effort.

Effort

It seemed more often true that we prefer doing things which are easier to persue and that’s why James Clear in his book the atomic habits suggest this too.

He suggests “If you wish to start running or do exercise in the early morning, sleep in your track suit so you don’t have to wear that in the morning.”

This is an example of using effort as a function of friction.

I too when I was building morning meditation my habit I used to do that on my bed and for 10 minutes only. I didn’t have to go another room or the terrace to meditate or find a more peaceful place. I was meditating on the same place where i was waking up.

All I had to do was to sit for next 10 minutes and play with my breaths & at the same place I was waking up. That’s how I build it in my habit. It didn’t took me more than a month to stick with this ritual. Although I was feeling doing this every single morning.

Here I did reduce both time and effort just to propel myself in those initial days. And the moment it was in my habit then only I moved to the another room with 20 minutes longer session but by far meditation was my regular part of the morning routine.

Now lets see how we can use distance as our beacon of life.

Distance

We all have this habit of using screens late night in bedroom. Which not only affects the quality of our sleep but our eye sights. Some scientist suggest that we should avoid any kind of screen 60 minutes prior to the bedtime. But no matter how hard we try we all get this final urge to check that goodbye message from our loved ones or to checkout our emails late nights or just the most devastating of one ; binge watch web series/anime.

The thing is, it isn’t that we are not aware about all this, but that we jut can’t help when we see our screens around us.

So in that scenarios, what we can do is to move our screens to the another room or to that couch facing the far side of the wall 60mins prior to our bedtime. We can increase this distance between us and that screen so we have to put efforts to cover that demanding distancing. Similarly we can remove our LED screens from our bed room, if late night shows is what we are so habitual of.

Additionally, if hitting the snooze button is your morning ritual, move the device away from you so you have to exert extra effort to stop using it. You’ll be awake in the meantime, ready to face the day.

These three frictional factors can be combined in an infinite number of ways to create or destroy any habit. No matter what, by combining these three components in nine more ways, we can create a variety of methods.

I’m a superhuman!

This is how we can create or destroy any habit by playing consciously against them using friction as a power tool.

Similar to this, I discovered that I read more often when I always carry a book with me. I also avoid using my phone while a Kindle is nearby.

Say it making or breaking a particular habit. We will discuss in our coming blogs which will specifically talk about those techniques. As far as the science is concerned, friction is the basic formula we can apply in every case just like gravity (gravity is everywhere ; no its not on moon).

In short friction is your superpower to be a super human.

Now you are no more under the control of your habits. Instead you control them now, from this moment onwards. So what habit are you trynna make or break? Share with us. Also share which methodology you are already using to accomplish your objective so we can share that with rest of the humanity.

If you are just starting right now then just go and grab a notebook, target a habit, create a methodology, put some friction in there and see how that works out.

And till our next blog…..adios!

Dad : Hey son, don’t use that word again? Son : Alright Dad I wont, I fcking promise you! Dad : Naah, not again Son : I guess I got this in my habit. Dad : fck it, son

So it’s quite easier to build a habit then breaking a one, all you have to do is to make it obvious and easier. But when it comes on breaking a one, breaking one like dead scrolling some shit like Instagram or stop using some catchphrases like f*ck(no, it doesn’t sound cool anymore)…………..

As we near that time, we will cover all of these topics in our coming posts.