Why Is It so Hard to Create Permanent Habits?
Motivation works well in the short-term. But motivation wanes. Habit-building methods are great because they translate that short term motivation into something more durable. You’re going to need habits, and you need to build habits that last for the long-term benefit of your goals.
The Gospel of Changing Habits
The transition from motivated bursts to stable habits is often so powerful that people who’ve never tried it before become proselytizing converts
- Many bloggers build their initial audiences on habit forming, perhaps because habits are a popular topic.
- Or maybe because the methods are so powerful, people feel compelled to start a blog about them.
Habits are Metastable
Not all habits are equally easy to build
- Some have higher intrinsic effort required, which results in not only higher intrinsic cost but also higher decision costs
- You can’t establish an unlimited number of habits
- Most habits are only metastable – you could set up many intrinsically easy habits, but probably not a large amount of intrinsically difficult habits
How to Deal With Medium-Term Habits
The most important positions to look at when setting a habit are during possible disruptions
- If you temporarily have to break a habit, then re-establishing it as soon as the interruption is gone should be your top priority
- Create a placeholder habit in its absence
Habits Work Well in the Medium-Term
If you follow the basic assumption of habits, that it takes a few months of running a habit to make it permanent, you should have had time to permanently stabilize dozens, perhaps hundreds, of habits.
- Instead, in the last ten years, you are far more likely to restart than create new habits. Why do some habits require perpetual maintenance to sustain?
Action Requires Two Kinds of Effort
Any action requires two kinds of effort in order to get done: intrinsic effort that depends on the action and an effort to decide whether or not to execute the action
- Habits can reduce the intrinsic cost by making you better at the task
- As you read more difficult books, you get better at reading, so it doesn’t require as much energy
- In addition, a good habit will eliminate the decision cost by eliminating the ambiguity of when and how to perform the behavior