3 Rarely Discussed Complexities of Habit Formation

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If you often read self-improvement articles, you know the basics of habit formation. However, in practice, when people try to execute common habits advice, some complexities can come up that affect how successful people are in building habits. Let's break down three examples.

1. Making a Habit More Enjoyable Can Backfire (in the Short Term)

There are two opposing forces to consider when designing your habits.

(A) Adding variety to your habit can make it more enjoyable. When a habit is more enjoyable, it can help us be more consistent. For example, if the habit is healthy eating, then more varied meal prep can make that more enjoyable and make it easier to be consistent.

Versus:

(B) Adding variety to a habit makes it less automatic, which can make being consistent harder. For example, if you eat the same healthy meal for lunch day in, day out, that automaticity makes it easier to be consistent. Removing all decision-making puts the habit purely on autopilot. Organization becomes easier: You're less likely to run out of ingredients if you know you'll always need them, not just sometimes.

In reality, we need to understand how these opposing forces are influencing our habits. This is where self-observation and self-knowledge are necessary. Sometimes you'll need extra variety to combat monotony or rigidity, even at the cost of your habit becoming less automatic (and therefore more fragile) in the short term.

Adding variety to your habits will often increase their resilience in the long term, for example, by giving you more options and flexibility when something gets in the way of you doing one version of the habit.

The art of habit-building is finding ways to add variety for enjoyment without making the habit less automatic. Another common life domain where this challenge comes up is deciding whether to add variety to your exercise routine.

2. Building a Habit in the Foreground, and Building One in the Background, Are Different Skills. You Need Both.

By building a habit in the foreground, I mean revolving your life around the new habit. It becomes a major focus, one of your top three priorities. For example, your priorities might be your work, parenting, and whatever the new habit is. Other activities and interests fall away because you devote yourself to your new habit.

Building a new habit in the background means trying to do it without letting it take over your life, and without making it your top optional priority after your basic responsibilities.

Some folks are skilled at developing new habits by revolving their life around the new habit, but not at building them in the background. A lot of habit content is written by and for people who lean intense, prefer obsessional approaches to new habits, and have the resources and circumstances to allow that.

If you're skilled at developing new habits by making them a top priority, try building the skill of developing a habit in the background, without major changes to your other activities or focus. You might even think of these as different skills. Both are tools worth having.

If you want to build habits but don't want to revolve your life around them, your challenge is figuring out how to translate habits content, written by and for people who lean intense, into versions that fit your natural approach.

Enacting new habits can shift your sense of your identity, but you may not always want that.

3. As You Get Better at Habit Formation, You'll Start to Enjoy Aspects You Don't Now

The following are important general principles within psychology:

• When something is more familiar and/or we're better at it, we like it more.
• Our actions powerfully influence our thoughts.

Habit Formation Essential Reads

Why Behaviour Change Is So Hard to Do

How to Find a Well-Being Habit You'll Actually Stick With

If there are aspects of habit formation that don't appeal to you now, you'll likely enjoy them more as you get better at them.

For example, you might not like the idea of gradually accumulating more self-disciplined habits (habit stacking), or of gradually growing your habits over time, like starting strength training with the puny weights you can actually manage now and building up to the weights you want to be able to do.

You might see yourself as impatient and not inclined to go through that process. You might see yourself as not wanting to do the same sequence of actions the same way to build consistency. You might see yourself as wanting to look for ways to distract yourself and avoid boredom, rather than building self-discipline and mental strength when sticking to a routine is challenging you. Or you might not be interested in changing your mental chatter so it's more compatible with self-discipline.

But as you do these things, you will both grow and prove your capabilities and become more interested in developing self-discipline and mental strength, even if these were not priorities for you before. Through actually following the principles of habits science, you will both create and discover aspects of yourself that surprise you.

The Nuance of Habits Science Is Where Some of the Fun Is

Sometimes people are put off by aspects of habit formation or common suggestions. Other times people are more enthusiastic but encounter a theory-implementation gap. The points here provide nuance and clarify common challenges that trip people up. They help you see a pathway to applying common habits advice that meets you where you are and lets you develop as you naturally do, rather than expecting you to shape yourself into the mold of the people who are typically drawn to habits or the personalities of people who typically write about habits. When you meet yourself where you are, building habits becomes genuinely interesting and can become a source of self-discovery. If habits and routines feel boring to you, read this post next to get a new perspective.