On Changing Your Habits

Joe Stych, where you can read the full article — a good example of a kind of virtue ethics:

A great daily routine is the holy grail of productivity. But the building blocks for that routine, habits, are tough to start, and even harder to change. Whether you want to meditate more, drink more water, or floss more than twice a month, these psychology-backed strategies can help you develop a new habit and keep it from fading.

You probably already know what a habit is (heck, you probably have a few of your own) but here’s a basic definition: a habit is behavior that an individual performs over and over again, sometimes automatically. But what turns a behavior into a habit?

Charles Duhigg, who wrote “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business”, thinks that habits are reinforced by a three-part loop: trigger, behavior, and reward. The trigger tells you—consciously or unconsciously—to start the behavior, the behavior is the habit or action, and the reward is the benefit that you get from that action. You can see the loop: That coveted reward teaches us to continue the behavior, over and over again, until it turns into a habit.