Hijacking Your Habits for 2023

Welcoming in the 2023 year with refreshed optimism and a clean slate (or perhaps 7 days of newly established consistency if you got a head start last week), it’s time we hijack some bad or less productive habits for better ones.

But first, let’s talk about the make-up of a habit.

What Are Habit Triggers?

A trigger is defined as an event that kicks off the automatic urge to complete a habit.

Triggers are the key to forming new habits and breaking old ones. A new trigger can help form new habits and removing a trigger can help break an old one. Simply put, triggers make the habit action happen.

A trigger can be anything in our environment which our brains associate with a habit. Where we are, who we are with, and what just happened have a powerful and invisible effect upon our behavior.

Every time a trigger successfully triggers a habit, our brains strengthen the association between a habit and its trigger. As an association between a habit and a trigger increases, the habit becomes more and more ingrained until we can perform our habits on full auto-pilot.

Why Are Triggers Important?

In order to break a habit, we need to understand and recognize our triggers. Our old habits are constantly being reinforced by their triggers. We tend to repeat what we previously did in a similar situation. The key though is recognizing what our triggers are in order to be aware, to avoid them if needed, and build a support to reframe them.

If the trigger for an old habit never occurs, the habit loop is interrupted. Without repeated reinforcement, the association between habit and trigger weakens through neglect. Therefore, if we can eliminate our exposure to triggers for old habits, we can eliminate the habits themselves.

How Can We Create Triggers That Work?

Triggers are quite easy to recognize and formulate once you understand them. We can use triggers to program our behaviors in the same way we would program a computer or complete simple logic statements.

“IF [THIS], THEN [THAT]”.

To create a new habit, start by writing it out in the form of an algorithm:

“IF [Trigger], THEN [Do Habit Behavior]”.

The best triggers are all Specific, Consistent, Automatic, and Unavoidable.

1. Specific. When instructions are clear, there is no room for interpretation, loopholes, or ways to misrepresent a trigger.

2. Consistent. The more consistent or frequent a trigger leads to a habit, the more strong that association becomes.

3. Automatic. When a trigger happens on its own without any ongoing effort or conscious/active effort on your part, the more reliably it can trigger. If you have to actively complete a trigger or play a role in the trigger, the more unreliable it becomes as a trigger.

4. Unavoidable. The more unavoidable the trigger, the more reliable it is in activating a habit. If your trigger is avoidable, then of course there is more room for error, room for loopholing your desired habit, and more excuses to not do the habit.

Trigger Categories:

1) Preceding Event

It is important to realize that there are hundreds of pre-existing triggers already happening throughout your day. Every morning we get out of bed, get dressed, brush our teeth, make breakfast, make coffee, and travel to work. Each of these preceding events represents an opportunity to stack on a new productive habit.

If we don’t complete the tasks in this order, there is a visceral feeling of skipping a step, missing something or something being atypical. This is how powerful each event acts as a trigger to the next habit.

How to Use Preceding Events Triggers:

Stack habits together into routines.

In a routine, each of the habits forms part of a structure which reinforces the other habits. This is particularly useful in the morning or before bed when energy and attention are lowest.

By completing the trigger action, you set the first routine habit in motion. This increases the chances of completing all of the habits in the routine.

There is a reason when you enter the washroom in the morning you think about going to the toilet, brushing your teeth, washing your face, putting on face cream, flossing. Those all stack together under the ‘morning routine’.

2) Time

Our biological clocks and forced synchronization with societal rhythms make time a powerful and universal trigger. We wake up, go to work, and eat our meals at similar times each day.

Time can be very useful with habit building because it is not ambiguous and has a recurring predictability. 9:15AM happens at every day. The trouble is that we, as humans, are not reliable timekeepers and lose track of time.

This is why automatic digital reminders for ourselves such as an alarm, a calendar event, or an app notification are so useful.

How to Utilize Time Triggers:

This is why I love my Apple watch because I get tactile feedback to buzz my arm at specific times of day. I don’t need my phone on me and it doesn’t disturb the people around me either. It’s just a tactile cue for only me to know what needs to happen next.

A recurring notification on my watch triggers when I need to start heading out the door in the morning to get to work on time. That trigger ensures I am punctual.

3) Location

Location is a powerful driver of automatic habits. You do certain things in certain locations and it can either work in your favour or disturb your productivity. Putting ourselves in a supportive environment is the most important proactive factor we can manipulate to ensure that we stick to our good habits.

All of our familiar locations have habits (good and bad) already associated with them. If we want to build new habits in these locations, we need to overwrite the triggers that already exist there.

For me, the office space where my desktop computer can be a trigger to playing video games. I enjoy playing video games but I know I will have an urge to game if I sit for too long in the computer room.

Luckily, we can replace some location-based triggers with physical reminders for our desired habits instead of our undesired or less-productive habits.

Knowing what triggers are doing to our behaviours is the first step to addressing those habits.

For me, actively being aware of that urge to game and instead forming new active habits on top of that trigger instead is helping me re-write those habits.

How To Utilize Location Triggers:

So right now, I am still working on weakening the trigger-behavior relationship between my computer room and playing video games. It’s not a terrible habit but it’s not as productive as I want to be.

So while this relationship still exists, I am using it to my advantage. When I have the urge to play video games, that urge is a trigger for me to exercise. If I have already exercised that day, I will allow myself to play video games. But if I have not exercised that day, I will then leave the room (to avoid further location trigger cues) and do something positive for my physical health. Whether that is dancing, strength training, or calisthenics.

4) Emotional State

Emotions are common triggers for our bad habits. We eat, not because we are hungry, but because we are bored. We play mindless games or impulsively check social media, not because we enjoy them, but to distract us from our stress and anxiety. A lot of our ‘maladaptive behaviors’ exist as escapism from the actual pain point.

Being aware of the important signals that are emotions is helpful to acknowledging what is actually happening and how to feel those emotions more productively. We can never truly subdue or repress our emotions in a healthy way so experiencing them in a healthy way is a much more viable option.

This one is going to be a bit more personal because we all can experience emotions differently and respond to those emotions differently. Take some time to make note of the signs that you may be in one of these negative emotional states. Ask your partner or family. They will usually have a pretty good idea of your warning signs or telltale signs.

By taking these telltale signs as triggers for a productive or safe habit, we can create appropriate outlets or avenues to express our emotion. Whether that is taking a break, walking outside, safely expressing pent-up energy into something like art or physical activity, it can be a positive outlet we won’t regret.

Without these habits in place, our energy can be volatile, destructive, or accomplish something we might regret.

How To Utilize Emotional State Triggers:

When I get anxious or stressed, I don’t notice it mentally. Mentally, I stay pretty even-keel but instead, there are telltale physical signs for me. My shoulders raise and get tight. I get a knot in my stomach that takes days to relax. I get irritated with people. Knowing these signs lets me recognize what needs to happen next, what I may need to do physically to ensure I am taking care of myself, and that I can continue to remain productive.

For example, I try to take a bath or massage my shoulders at the end of a stressful day because I know my posture and shoulder pain may come. I also know I have lower back pain so scheduling a massage might help me through the stressful times.

5) Other People

People can act as triggers. Your habits, the way you act, the way you feel can ultimately be a result of person triggers.

Friends and family will reinforce and encourage the behaviors that they value and sabotage the behaviors which they don’t value. They will positive reinforce things they want out of you and negatively suppress the things they don’t want. And this is happening with or without their conscious intention.

When building (or breaking) a habit, it is critical to consider the role your significant other, your roommates, your friends and your extended family’s impact on you. Pretty much anyone you spend a lot of time with.

Let’s say your friends always ask you to play video games but you’re trying to break a video game habit. Well, they’re acting as a trigger for a habit you’re trying to break. Now you’re in an awkward situation where you are avoiding socializing with friends, not because you don’t like your friends but because you don’t want such a strong habit of gaming. Being explicit in communicating your intention will help their buy-in and support of your decisions. They will question your choices less once they understand the motivations behind them. They can also keep you accountable if they sense you are failing.

To maximize chances of success, turn habit building into an accountability partnership with others. If you have trouble going to the gym, a gym buddy can be the answer! You will feel pressure to show up for them and they will feel pressure to show up for you.

How To Utilize Other People Triggers:

I try to have social reinforcement for my goals and habits by making them public to my close friends.

We actively discuss our goals for the year, our hopes and expectations and we keep each other accountable. By sharing with others, we give feedback, are invested in each other’s success and we also have a bet for who accomplishes the most from their goals. Even when my friends are not even living in the same area as me, they still act as triggers through our regular interactions.

So What Happens In 2023?

It’s a brand new year. I challenge you to take inventory of your current habits and what habits you’d like to replace to become more productive.

How will you move forward?

Maybe if you are a perfectionist, once you ask yourself the question, “Am I done yet?”, you can set a time trigger to stop working on a project within the hour. It gives you an hour to add any last minute changes but also forces you to complete something rather than extending the deadline indefinitely. That may be the necessary trigger for you to get more accomplished rather than dragging your feet on finishing a project.

If you are a daydreamer, what are your triggers to start daydreaming? Maybe it’s a location trigger that you’ve been in the same space for too long and a change in scenery may break that habit. Going to a coffee shop, the library or even a different space in your home may break that habit and keep you productive quicker.

What about if you have FOMO and other people are the trigger to getting distracted? What about a no-phone policy between certain times of the day where notifications are off, phone is silent and in a different room and you can focus for deep work. Obviously communicating that intention with your friends is important to make sure you don’t come across as ignoring them, but think of the wonders it can have on your productivity.

What are your triggers? And how will you optimize them for your habit building needs? Let me know if you have anything special or interesting that you do differently in your life. I’d love to hear!