Cheat Your Way To Healthy Habits
AGGREGATION OF MARGINAL GAINS
Small habits repeated over a long time can produce remarkable results. There’s no cheat code to achieving your dreams and ambitions, but there is a cheat code to put the habits in place that will take you there.
Luckily for you and us, some brilliant and insightful people have spent decades researching and decoding this process for us. We’ll share with you in this guide lessons learnt from personal experience, from coaching 100’s of clients and research from the latest books and information on building habits.
Armed with the information in this guide and a small amount of will-power, we’re confident anyone can achieve their health and wellbeing aspirations.
Here’s a story that uniquely showcases the incredible power of compounding habits.
In 2003 the British cycling team hired a new performance director named Dave Brailsford. What was about to unfold far exceeded anyone’s wildest expectations.
From 1908 until that fateful day in 2003, the British cycling team had won a solitary gold medal at the Olympics, and no Brit had ever won the Tour de France.
During the proceeding 15 years, from 2003 to 2017, British cyclists won 178 world championships, sixty-six Olympic or paralympic gold medals and 5 Tour de France titles, in what is now regarded as the most prosperous reign in cycling history.
How did this happen? Could all of this success be attributed to one person?
It’d be a stretch to say Dave was responsible for all of that success. This was a massive team effort.
However, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone that would argue against Dave’s philosophy ‘the aggregation of marginal gains’ being entirely responsible for this dramatic turnaround in results.
The philosophy is simple - small improvements in everything you do. Over time the British cycling team made hundreds of 1% improvements that changed their cycling history.
This is what building healthy habits is all about—making small changes to your daily behaviours that add-up over-time to produce life-changing results.
Suppose you can improve, just 1% every day at a chosen pursuit. In only one year, you’ll be 37x better.
You can make your dreams and ambitions possible just by repeatedly making small improvements to the way you live your life every day.
HABITS
What are habits? “Habits are simply reliable solutions to recurring problems in our environment” - James Clear.
Habits make our life easier. We can use them to automate our process of improvement. They are shortcuts we can rely on to achieve specific outcomes without even having to think. Habits can make things like willpower and motivation redundant.
When an action becomes a habit, it becomes part of your subconscious mind. Instead of having to find the motivation to complete an action, you’ll ‘just do it.
Here’s how habits work
Step 1: The Trigger
Your sensors trigger your brain to initiate a behaviour. For example, you smell some nice food.
Step 2: The Craving
Next, your cravings kick-in to motivate you to complete an action. If you smell nice food, all of a sudden you’ll want to eat.
Step 3: The Response
Now you respond. Your response is the action you need to take to satisfy that craving. If you smell nice food and crave it, you’ll likely eat it.
Step 4: The Reward
Then you get rewarded. Your reward is the satisfaction you feel when you’ve fulfilled your craving. After you’ve eaten, you’re satisfied and no longer feel hungry or crave food. Your body now has the energy it needs to keep going.
If this cycle is completed, then you’ve created a habit loop. If you complete a habit loop enough times, that habit will become part of who you are. Instead of thinking about it, you’ll just do it.
As a side note, ever wondered why KFC, Mcdonalds and all the other naughty foods are so appealing? Our brains have evolved to place a high value on foods dense in salt, sugar and fats. Calorie dense foods like these were a rarity and a survival goldmine for our hunter-gatherer predecessors.
Yes, Mcdonalds, KFC and every other processed food company you’ve ever supported knows this and designs their foods to play on these rewards centres in your brain.
MAKE IT OBVIOUS
Habits, whether good or bad, all have the same starting line. This is what we call the cue; you can think of it as a trigger to kick off your habit.
When you pull the trigger, a chain reaction starts that makes you crave something, leads you to complete an action to satisfy that craving and in the end, provides you with a reward.
Without pulling the trigger, the habit cycle doesn’t start, and nothing happens.
These cues can present themselves in many different forms and cause us to do all sorts of unexpected things. How many times has a scroll through social media resulted in you being $10 - $100 poorer? We’ve all been guilty of impulse buying.
What’s happening here? We see something in our feed (cue) typically presented in a certain way. Hence, we visualise a need for it (craving), and voila 2 minutes later, we’ve exchanged our credit card details and money for something we didn’t know existed 5 minutes ago.
Have you ever noticed that many of the items you purchase at a supermarket are conveniently placed at eye-level on the shelves? Or how all the stuff you know you shouldn’t be buying sits on display shelves at the end of Ailes. The more obvious a product is, the more likely you are to buy it.
Our senses trigger us; sight, smell, touch, sound & taste. The more obvious you can make a ‘healthy’ habit, the more likely you will do it.
Trick 1: Set an intention
Even more apparent than a visual cue is setting an intention to make a habit. The night before you want to do something, grab a piece of paper and write down your intention for tomorrow.
I will [complete desired action] at [location] at [time].
Trick 2: Create a visual cue
Of all the senses we have, sight is the most powerful. Some scientists estimate half of the brain's resources are dedicated to vision.
You can use this knowledge to your advantage. The easiest way to pull the trigger on a healthy habit is by making it obvious with a visual cue.
Want to drink more water - place a full drink at your desk.
MAKE IT ATTRACTIVE
What’s next? Find a way to make your new healthy habit/s attractive. Like we talked about earlier, ‘finding motivation’ only works for so long.
If you’re forcing yourself to jump through mental hoops to do a given action, you’ll become less and less likely to do it over time.
So let's try and turn something you potentially dread into something you want to do. I.e. hacking your motivation.
Enter dopamine.
Numerous studies have shown that our desire to do anything is virtually zero without a kick of dopamine. Even pleasure isn’t enough to overcome a lack of dopamine.
Because of that, you can think of habits as dopamine-driven feedback loops.
Sugar, sex, drugs or scrolling social media all give us pleasure, but if they didn’t help our brains release dopamine, we’d have no desire to experience any of those pleasures.
More interesting than that, dopamine is not only released when you experience pleasure, but it’s also released in anticipation of you experiencing pleasure.
Talk to anyone struggling with an addiction, and they’ll be able to identify with that sensation. For instance, take a smoker; they’ll be getting a hit of dopamine before taking a puff on a cigarette, not after.
This is why anticipating a reward such as a cheeseburger, a beer, or a birthday present can feel better than actually receiving it.
Professor of psychology Dr Edward Deci defines motivation as ‘the energy for action’.
If you can train your brain to anticipate a reward for any given action to trigger a release of dopamine, you’ll get all the energy you need to complete that action.
Instead of searching for motivation, you can use motivators to fuel your new habits.
Trick 1: Pair a new healthy habit with something you enjoy doing.
An obvious one is listening to music. Many of our gym members train with their headphones on, listening to their favourite beats. Every time they train, they know they’ll get to listen to music they enjoy.
We also know of members who stretch while watching their favourite tv show.
Trick 2: Do it with someone.
It’s amazing what a bit of peer pressure can do. In the same way, you can easily cave in for a few wines or beers while out for dinner. You can use peer pressure to get a new habit of going.
Many of our gym members have training partners. It’s way harder to bail on a mate than it is yourself. Better yet, hopefully, you’ll look forward to a chinwag and not even ‘worry’ about the training you’re about to do.
MAKE IT EASY
In his book atomic habits, James Clear talks about a fundamental difference between motion and action.
Through his research, he found many of us get stuck in motion but don’t take action. Here’s the difference:
Motion is reading five books on nutrition, while the action is cooking a healthy meal to eat.
Motion is talking to a personal trainer about training, and action is booking a gym session and doing the exercise.
Action produces an outcome; motion doesn’t.
To recap: Habit formation is the process by which a behaviour becomes progressively more automatic through repetition. The more you repeat an activity, the more your brain’s structure changes to become efficient at that activity, making it easier to do the next time and making you more likely to do it.
So how do you go from motion to action and get those repetitions in?
Here’s a thought exercise for you. Given two scenarios, what are you more likely to do?
Action A, which is easy and doesn’t take much time to complete.
Action B, which is difficult and takes a long time to complete.
I’d bet action A.
Human Beings are hardwired to take the easy option. The world we live in today is vastly different to the world our hunter-gatherer predecessors lived in 50,000 years ago.
However, even though our surroundings are completely different, our hardware is remarkably similar. Then like now, given two options, we always default to the one that helps us conserve energy.
Survival used to be our primary goal. Our ability to conserve energy was the difference between life and death.
Now we live in relative luxury, and most of us have the opportunity to seek more than just survival. In this modern world, taking the easy option doesn’t serve us as well as it used to. In fact, for most long-term goals, taking the easy option is counterproductive.
Except when we are trying to create new habits.
We’ve all made the mistake of setting lofty goals and charging at them 100 mph only to burn out, give up and move on just as quickly as we started.
As you now know, to form a habit, we need to complete an action as many times as possible. Rather than 10,000 hours, we should aim for 10,000 iterations. The more times we complete an action, the more likely we are to keep doing it.
So set the bar low and focus on the number of times you do something, not how long you spend doing it.
Trick 1: Start with the 2-minute rule.
For your first week, aim for 2 minutes of any new habit—iterations, not time.
For example, if you want to get fit, and you need to make exercise a habit. Start with a 2-minute walk each day.
Trick 2: Prepare appropriately
Remove all the friction of doing an action beforehand.
If you know, you’re going for a walk after work—lay out your walking clothes in the morning.
Starting small and doing it often will always beat large, infrequent efforts. Make it easy.
MAKE IT SATISFYING
Finally, the fun part.
Whether we like to admit it or not. We’re all driven by incentives. The desire to be liked, the desire to be respected, the desire for social status and so on.
99% of us don’t go to work every day, just for fun. We go to get paid. Liking the job and the people we work with is a bonus but way more often than not, it isn’t our reason for showing up.
Knowing that, it’s pretty easy to understand why receiving a reward is essential to keeping a good thing going, i.e. your new healthy habits.
For some habits, the reward will be self-fulfilling. If you lose a little weight, you might be able to fit into some old clothes or feel more confident in public.
If you get fitter, you’ll have more energy for your kids. You’ll perform better at your weekend sports. You’ll feel like a more capable human being.
Some of those rewards take a while to reveal themselves, and some will not reveal themselves at all.
We’re still working with the same hardware our ancestors had 50,000 years ago, as we talked about earlier. Responding to immediate rewards helped them survive. Now responding to immediate rewards leads to addictions, health issues and broken relationships.
We live in what’s called a delayed-return environment. But we still value present rewards more than future rewards. Scientists call this time-inconsistency.
Forming healthy habits will require you to give up short-term pleasure for long-term rewards.
For example, if you were to take up a daily stretching routine without relieving a nagging pain. Improving your flexibility which will reduce your chances of getting injured or developing back pain, won’t provide you with an immediate or obvious reward.
You need to find a way to bridge that gap between now and your future rewarded self. Something that will make the short-term sacrifice worthwhile.
In this case, a wrong + a right is much better than a nothing. Just don’t go too crazy with the reward.
Give yourself a reason to ‘go to work’, and you’ll be much more likely to keep showing up.
Over time you won’t need the reward; when your new action becomes an ingrained habit, you’ll just do it.
Trick 1: Track your progress
Use a whiteboard, a jar, or anything where you can record and tangibly see the work you’ve been putting in. Each time you complete an iteration of your habit and put another mark on the board, you’ll feel a sense of accomplishment and want to do more.
Trick 2: Make it painful
The reverse of making it satisfying is making it painful for you to fail. Create an agreement with someone that costs you each time you don’t do a habit. The cost of losing money can be a surprisingly good motivator.