6 small habits can CHANGE your life in 2025 (21 day plan)

ruticker 06.03.2025 8:52:41

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**Today, we're talking all about habits: making and breaking various habits.** Many people are thinking about New Year's resolutions; they're thinking about leaving some things behind and acquiring some new behaviors. I'm also going to spell out two specific types of habit formation and habit-breaking programs. I'm going to boil these down to some very explicit steps that anyone can use. I think we can all appreciate the value of having habits. Habits organize our behavior into more or less reflexive action, so we don't have to think too much. Of course, habits can be more elaborate too. We can be in the habit of exercising at a particular time of day, eating certain foods, or saying (or not saying) certain things. However, there are many habits that don't serve us well or that perhaps even undermine our immediate and long-term health goals, psychological goals, and even some habits that can really undermine our overall life goals. So today, we're going to talk about making meaning, forming, and breaking meaning—stopping various habits. I want to spell out a particular system that could be very useful to most, if not all, people for how to build in habits and then test whether or not those habits have really stuck. **Basically, what this involves is:** 1. You set out to perform **six new habits per day** across the course of **21 days**. 2. Why six and why 21? Well, we'll talk about that in a moment, but the idea is you write down six things that you would like to do every day for 21 days. 3. However, the expectation is that you'll only complete **four to five** of those each day. Built into this is a kind of permission to fail, but it's not failure. It turns out that this approach to forming habits is based not so much on the specific habits that you're trying to form but the habit of performing habits—it's the habit of doing a certain number of things per day. So, for **21 days**, you list out four to five things. It might be Zone 2 cardio, resistance training, sunlight viewing, journaling, or learning a language. Again, this is going to vary depending on your particular goals and the habits that you're trying to create, but no more than six. The expectation is that you're not going to perform more than four to five. If you miss a day—meaning you don't perform four to five things—there is no punishment. In fact, it's important that you don't actually try and do what in the literature is called a **habit slip compensation**, which is just fancy psychological language for if you screw up and you don't get all four or five in one day, you don't do eight the next day in order to compensate. After 21 days, you stop engaging in this 21-day deliberate four to five things per day type schedule, and you simply go into **autopilot**. You ask yourself, "How many of those particular habits that I was deliberately trying to learn in the previous 21 days are automatically incorporated into my schedule? How many of them am I naturally doing?" In other words, every 21 days, you don't update and start adding new habits; you simply try and maintain the ones that you built in during that first 21 days. This is extremely useful, I believe, because it will allow you to assess whether or not you can indeed make room—if you even have room, I should say—for more habits. Many people are trying to cram so many new behaviors into their nervous system that they don't stand a chance of learning all those behaviors. What you may find is that you kept up two of those things very consistently throughout the 21 days, and perhaps there was one of them that you did sporadically, and there were three others that frankly you didn't manage to execute. You may also be one of these people—one of these mutants—that sets out to do six new things per day for 21 days and performs every single one of them. Terrific! More power to you! In that case, for the following 21 days, let's see whether or not you can continue to perform those very same six things every day for 21 days. Then, and only then, would you want to add more habits in. You could repeat this 21-day process—21 days of new habit, 21 days of testing those new habits to see whether or not they're reflexive. You could do that forever if you wanted, but the idea is that this isn't something that you're doing all year long. It's that you perhaps start the new year, or regardless of when you're listening to this, you set out to make that 21-day really the stimulus period in which the habits get wired in. Then the following month, and maybe even the following months or periods of 21 days, are really the kind of thermometer or the test bed of how well you've embedded those particular habits thus far. **We've almost exclusively been discussing how to form habits, but what about breaking habits?** Certainly, many people out there would like to break habits that they feel don't serve them well. One of the challenges in breaking habits is that many habits occur very quickly, and so there isn't an opportunity to intervene until the habit has already been initiated and, in some cases, completed. If a set of neurons is very electrically active, it's likely that over time those neurons will communicate with themselves more easily because of changes in things like NMDA receptor activity, the recruitment of additional receptors, etc. It's essentially a cellular and molecular explanation for how something goes from unlearned to learned to reflexive. To identify a specific protocol that one could apply in order to break habits, how do you take two neurons that underlie a habit out of synchrony? How do you get them to fire asynchronously? This is pretty interesting with the cellular molecular biology, but at the behavioral level, it's especially interesting. The way that one would do this is, let's say for instance you have a habit of picking up your phone mid-work session. Okay, that's a reflexive habit. I think that most people have experienced this. We often hear the idea that, "Oh, you know, the phone is so filled with access to dopamine and incredible things that we're just drawn to it." But if you notice what's happened with phone use over time, most people—including myself, sometimes I admit—find ourselves just looking at our phone or find ourselves in a particular app without actually having engaged in the conscious set of steps of, "Oh, I'm really curious what's going on in this particular app. I'm really curious what's going on in this particular website." You just sort of find yourself doing it because the behavior of picking up your phone is sort of reflexive or has become fully reflexive. The literature says there are a number of ways to break these sorts of habitual behaviors or reflexive behaviors. Most of those approaches involve establishing some sort of reward for not performing the activity or some sort of punishment for performing the activity. The problem is when people are not being monitored for habit use—for instance, you can imagine a situation where you say, "I'm not going to pick up my phone for the four hours in the early part of the day so that I can get real dedicated focused work done." Unless someone's monitoring them, then people don't tend to monitor themselves completely enough that they punish themselves completely enough to break the behavior. In other words, the punishment isn't bad enough to break the habit, which just speaks to how powerful these habits are once they become reflexive. They're just very, very hard to override. It turns out that the key is actually to take the period immediately following the bad habit execution—meaning, let's say you tell yourself you're not going to pick up your phone, you're not going to bite your nails, you're not going to reflexively walk to the refrigerator at a particular time of day—but you find yourself doing it anyway. What actually has to happen is bringing conscious awareness to the period immediately afterward. I think most people recognize, "Oh, I just did it again. I just did it again." In that moment, capture the sequence of events—not that led to the bad habit execution, but actually to take advantage of the fact that the neurons that were responsible for generating that bad habit were active a moment ago and to actually engage in a replacement behavior immediately afterward. Now, this is really interesting and I think powerful because I would have thought that you have to engage in a replacement behavior that truly replaces the bad habit behavior—that you would have to be able to identify your state of mind or the sequence of events leading into the bad habit. But rather, the stage or the period immediately after the bad habit execution is a unique opportunity to insert a different type of what we would call adaptive behavior. That could be any behavior that's not in line with the bad behavior. So let's give an example: let's say you find yourself trying to do focused work, you pick up your phone, and you're disappointed in yourself for picking up your phone. You could, of course, just put it down and re-engage in the work behavior, but if you were good at that, then you probably wouldn't have done it in the first place. What turns out to be very effective is to go engage in some other positive habit. Now, this has two major effects. The first one is you start to link in time the execution of a bad behavior to this other good behavior. In doing so, you start to recruit other neural circuits, other neurons that can start to somewhat dismantle the sequence of firing associated with the bad behavior. In other words, you start to create a kind of a double habit that starts with a bad habit and then ends with a good habit. That seems to create enough of a temporal mismatch so that then recognizing when you're heading toward the bad habit becomes more apparent to you. As I mentioned before, this might seem counterintuitive. You might think, "Why would I want to reward the execution of a bad habit with a good habit? I don't want to reward myself for the bad habit." But really, what you're trying to do is change the nature of the neural circuits that are firing so that you can rewrite the script for that bad habit. What this does then is it changes the whole nature of the sequence of neurons that are firing from the bad habit through to the end of this newly applied good habit. This is the way in which you start to dismantle—or, when I say dismantle, really weaken—the likelihood that if neuron A fires, neuron B will fire. In doing so, you create a chain of neuronal activation that then is very easy to dismantle. When people have applied this kind of approach, it removes the need to have constant conscious awareness of one's own behavior prior to that behavior, which is very, very difficult to achieve. Rather, what they find is that they are able to engage in remapping of the neural circuits associated with bad habits in ways that are very straightforward. You can always identify when you've done the thing you don't want to do and then tack onto that something additional that's positive. Now, the nature of that positive thing is important. You don't want it to be something that's very hard to execute; you want it to be something that's positive and fairly easy to execute so that you're not struggling all the time to insert this on top of this bad behavior, whatever that bad behavior might happen to be. But again, this is rooted in the biology of long-term depression. It maps very well to the behavioral change literature that I was able to glean, which really shows that rather than just getting reminders, rather than trying to instill punishment, rather than setting up rewards for breaking bad habits, perhaps the simplest way to approach this is to tack on additional behaviors to the bad habits. Make sure those behaviors are good behaviors.

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