Why Habits Don't Work

I can’t tell you how many books, articles, and podcasts I’ve read or listened to about habits. Feels like there’s a new one everyday.

We are bombarded by social and traditional media of the importance of habits, tactics, and automaticity. These concepts focus on making tasks and behaviors more automatic and easier with the hope of saving us time and effort in creating personal change.

However, while habits and automaticity have their place, they can hinder the real personal growth and transformation we’re after. They tend to not address the deeper changes required.

Habits don’t always work, and there are two main reasons I want to explore:

1. Habits can promote quick fixes that only work in a vacuum.

2. You have too many roles (internal and external).

Let’s dig in. ⛏️ 

1. Habits Can Promote Quick Fixes That Only Work in a Vacuum

How many times have you heard a variation of these headlines?

1. "10 Secret Tactics to Transform Your Morning & Crush Your Day!"

2. "5 Insanely Effective Tricks to Build Any Habit in Just 30 Days!"

3. "This One Trick Will Unlock Your Full Potential"

4. "Supercharge Your Success: 8 Things You Need To Do Before 8am to Achieve Your Goals Faster"

5. "The Ultimate Guide: 12 Mind-Blowing Strategies to Win at Life and Get Everything You Want"

Besides being obvious clickbait, these titles play on one thing: our very human desire to get results easily.

Our brain is designed to conserve energy, and if there’s a tactic or trick that can get us results faster or more reliably, we’ll unconsciously gravitate towards it.

But tactics and shortcuts can backfire when it comes to making lasting progress. Instead of seeking “the top 8 things we need to do before 8am”, we are better served by concentrating on building self-awareness around our particular life’s aspects—the details most workable for the future we envision.

This approach is more personal and encourages us to find the few pivotal areas we need to push beyond, without trying to adopt every new habit or tactic mindlessly.

And it is often a removal of things, rather than an addition.

Author and Organizational Psychologist Benjamin Hardy tells us in his book Be Your Future Self Now:

This means that trying to “stack” another habit on your comfort zone isn’t how you evolve. It’s closer to how you stay the same.

Putting in the Reps Only Gets You Started

When we practice and ”put in the reps”, some change happens as our neurology adjusts and makes paths more readily available to that behavior. Blindly doing the reps however, will not affect change for long.

For example, we can see how many people tend to plateau in their fitness efforts, some eventually trending backwards. To continue to make progressive change, there needs to be the uncomfortable and appropriately timed stretching of capacity. Otherwise, the pathways we are building no longer require work and become mindless, making them easier to be overrun by others.

The more you repeat the behavior, the less conscious it becomes. This can be a good thing if we are aiming to build off of the behaviors into evolved versions, but it can eventually be detrimental to our progress if we rely solely on the automatic process.

So this means that repetition is not always a form of change. Even though author James Clear says “that simply putting in your reps is one of the most critical steps you can take to encoding a new habit," we need to be conscious about the process.

Yes, tactics and putting in the reps are a great place to start. They get the ball rolling, so to speak. But after we get rolling, this is typically where we trip up, or plateau. Marshall Goldsmith’s book title sums it up: What Got You Here Won't Get You There. For some of the important changes we are trying to make in our lives, simply continuing to put in the reps mindlessly as we have done before will only lead to plateauing.

What’s So Bad About Plateaus?

A plateau is flat. This is good when we need to take a rest, but bad when we are trying to grow. When the gravity of larger attention-grabbing things shifts our mindlessly built plateau to the left or to the right, the plateau becomes a slide. And we’ll just slide back down to where we were before.

This is just like our normal ”orbits” in life. If we don’t do something impactful to change the trajectory, we’ll just keep following our same loops.

We need to regularly self-reflect on the way we do things and course correct our processes. Deliberate practice helps to make the unconscious conscious, and allows us to step into the discomfort of growth towards our future self.

We will explore this in more detail later, but building to a foundational critical mass point instead of a flimsy plateau will provide the ability to make incremental improvements stick to you better.

2. You Have Too Many Roles

The second reason deals more with a combination of your default neurology and current situation.

Many people are what researcher Michelle Segar, Ph.D., author of The Joy Choice, calls “unhabiters,” meaning they struggle with forming habits due to juggling multiple roles and responsibilities.

Unhabiters need a more flexible approach to behavior change, which is why most new habits just don’t work for them. Segar suggests leveraging your brain's executive functioning system by using a method she calls POP, which stands for "pause," "open your options," and "pick the 'joy choice.'"

When we are juggling all the roles we have in life—parent, sibling, spouse, partner, friend, teacher, coworker, etc.—it can be even more difficult to introduce a new change. Following Segar’s suggestion of listening to what brings you joy is a strong starting point.

To me, this sounds like another form of prioritization, but one that is more focused on using your internal guidance system. Instead of focusing on external points of reference—what you ”should” do, listen more closely to yourself—what you could do that is truly important to you.

Fundamental Change Can Be Faster Than Habits

You might be reading this and thinking that the time required for this level of conscious effort is too much. I can understand that, and have felt the same.

It can feel like we only have extreme binary options: either find that “one trick,” or put in decades of work and a ton of hours. I realize now this thinking is flawed.

Malcolm Gladwell popularized the 10,000 hour rule as a marker to become world-class at something, and that can seem like a daunting about of time to invest if we desire to become “world-class” at knowing and mastering ourselves.

But in the quest of self-betterment, I find it fascinating to consider that fundamental change might actually happen quicker than forming habits. Using deliberate practice, the improvements we are after can take less time than you'd think, especially compared to those habitual routines we often fall into.

Cal Newport, in his book So Good They Can't Ignore You, shares some findings that propose a different perspective of the 10,000-hour rule. It turns out that it's not just about the hours we pour into something, but also the type of work we do during those hours.

In his book, Newport gave us the example of chess players. Some become grandmasters, while others remain at an intermediate level, even though both groups have logged around 10,000 hours of practice. The key difference? Grandmasters spend way more time in serious study and playing challenging games that offer immediate feedback.

So, it seems that focusing on those challenging tasks and learning from feedback can actually lead to more effective and faster results.

I think this insight is really worth dwelling on:

The iterations of quality hours are more important than just putting in the hours, and you can greatly shorten your time to mastery and personal change with this approach.

Key Take Aways

Ultimately, rather than just trying to form habits, we need to find out what is most workable for us. Here’s some options on how to do that:

1. Embrace deliberate practice over habit formation: Focus on developing adaptive self-awareness to identify key areas for personal growth rather than simply adopting habits and tactics. This starts with being honest with yourself.

2. Engage in conscious effort during practice: Be present in the process and make a conscious effort to stretch your capacity and evolve your behaviors, rather than relying solely on repetition and automaticity.

3. Use the POP method for flexible behavior change: If you struggle with forming habits due to multiple roles and responsibilities, try Segar's POP method, which stands for "pause," "open your options," and "pick the 'joy choice.'"

4. Focus on quality of effort over quantity: Newport's reference to chess players suggests that the type of work and practice we engage in matters more than the total time spent. Focus on challenging tasks and seek immediate feedback to improve faster and more effectively.

5. Regularly self-reflect and course-correct: Make time for self-reflection and evaluation of your processes to ensure you're engaging in deliberate practice and making the unconscious conscious. This will help you step into the discomfort of growth and move towards your future self.

By following these action steps, you can work towards personal growth and transformation in a more effective and mindful manner, moving beyond habits and automaticity to reach your full potential.

Did you find this helpful? Let me know!

I’m writing a book called Self Engineer that covers topics around applying software engineering concepts to self-development. It would mean the world to me if you checked it out.

Thank you for reading!