Habits are all about friction
2023-03-25
At least here in Germany it is a very common practice to make New Year's resolutions, which are mostly about building/improving habits like exercising more, eating healthier as well as spending more time with your family and friends. However, the vast majority of people don't succeed in reaching these goals in the long run - most start out strong, but then lose sight of their goal and ultimately give up. So let's take a look at why this happens and how you can actually make your dreams come true...
The common belief why people don't succeed is that they don't want to reach to goal hard enough, they don't have a strong will and they lack discipline . But honestly this is one of the biggest piles of garbage beliefs you will come across these days - right besides thinking that the earth is flat, COVID-19 was purposefully spread by a government or mass surveillance isn't common practice. In reality, everything about building and sustaining habits can reduced to the concept of friction .
Even though we don't like to admit it, our brain hasn't really evolved since the Stone Age and neither have our instincts or base behaviours. We usually take the easiest route (= the choice with the lowest friction) to reach our temporary targets like eating something and this was an excellent choice when life was all about finding enough food, making sure to still experiences the next day and producing ourselves. Nonetheless, this behaviour turned out to be a huge drawback in this day and age, where we plan for the long run and need to adapt our actions towards reaching these abstract goals, which can be unfavourable for the moment and hence have high friction.
Getting started is usually the hardest part of any good action, while keeping youself from falling back into bad behaviour is the hardest part of stopping bad habits. Therefore, it's all about reducing the friction between you and good habits or respectively increasing the friction between you and your bad habits. In this context, frictions describes the number of choice you have to make and the number of steps you have to take in order to start an action. A good example to understand this point is to look at two possbile scenarios for reaching the common goal of eating healthier:
- Scenario: You have a strong will to lose weight and improve you health by eating healthier, however you don't make sure to always have vegetables at home and keep all the candy that is still in some drawer. This leads to high friction for realising the good habit (as you would have to go to a grocery store first to cook a healthy meal), while leading to low friction for sticking with your bad habit (since you just have to open the drawer to enjoy your favourite chocolate or whatever). Therefore, you are very likely to not reach your goal.
- Scenario: You don't really need to, but want to eat healthier and plan ahead. You get rid of all the candy at home and ensure to always have something good to eat available, even in situations where there isn't much time. This greatly reduces to friction for realising the good habit (since you just have to open the the fridge to enjoy your favourite fruit or whatever), while increasing the low friction for sticking with your bad habit (as you would have to go to a grocery store first to eat some candy). Therefore, you are likely to reach your goal and stick with this behaviour.
As you can see, planning ahead, knowing your inner demon and reducing your possibilities to those which are beneficial for you are the key elements for successfully reaching your goals. To make things even easier, I recommend to start with small habits as they are easier to implement, connect new behaviour to already exisiting actions in order to completely mitigate the initial force needed to start and track your progress in your calendar or diary to stay motivated and keep an eye on way towards your success.
PS: If you are interested in an even further guide on how to build/sustain new habits, I can highly recommend to the book "Atomic Habits - Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results" by James Clear to you. It was a major inspiration for article and I try to apply the knowledge it gave me everywhere possible.