What We Repeatedly Do

I’ve been preaching the concept of consistency to my clients for years. In a fitness context, those who strength train for 20 minutes 3 days per week over 12 weeks will likely have a better body composition than those who do crash workouts for a few hours a day one week before their beach vacation. I won’t go into the biochemistry of why it takes time to build a physique, but part of the equation is making consistent investments in your body’s piggy bank.

I recently listened to The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and In Business while on my morning walks. It’s been on my personal “to read” list and the official recommended reading list that Crunch handed out to me during onboarding week over 6 years ago, and I finally got around to reading it. For anyone looking to lose weight, quit a bad habit, learn how marketers influence your purchase decisions, and change your life in a productive, sustainable way, I highly recommend you read (or listen to) this book by Charles Duhigg filled with anecdotes and research to jumpstart your journey. 

Duhigg provides examples of how habits shape our world and how to make (and break) habits. He talks about how athletes practice different game scenarios so that they don’t have to think about their next move, how a toothpaste brand created our current tooth brushing habit in the 1940s, and even why AA has helped so many alcoholics recover. The science behind how our brain works and the real life scenarios provided make this book both enjoyable and informative, so rather than summarizing its contents, I’ll provide my own example.

The main components that make up the “habit loop” are the cue, the routine, and the reward. Similar to the classical conditioning of Pavlov’s dogs, we can condition ourselves to obtain a habit. The cue is the something that triggers the behavior. A routine is a behavior that becomes second-nature. The reward reinforces the behavior and creates the habit.

Before listening to this audiobook, I was encouraging these habits among my clients without realizing I was following this structure. One client said she was low on energy for most of her work day, and after digging into her daily routine we discovered that she wasn’t drinking any water so she was perpetually dehydrated. I knew that getting her to drink half her bodyweight in ounces of water per day wasn’t going to happen overnight, so I told her to drink one glass of water as soon as she wakes up each morning. I told her to have a water bottle right next to her alarm clock so that the sound of her morning talk show cues her to drink her water. It took a few mornings to get used to the new routine, but she said that the days that she drank the water, she felt much more energetic in the mornings (the reward) and so she built a habit of hydrating throughout the day. 

I’ve found that I also follow this conditioning when I’m building a new habit. For example, to eat a well-balanced meal I know that I need a palm of protein, a thumb of fat, a cupped handful of carbohydrates, and as many colorful vegetables as my heart desires. If I want steak that night, that’s my cue to pair it with broccoli and create a fried rice dish with butter and peppers and onions. To build my running habit for marathon training, I had a few outfits and sneakers that were specific to running, so once I was laced up, I had to get out there and run the miles.

We are what we repeatedly do, and with the support of books like The Power of Habit, I can reinforce how important consistently sticking to good habits is for your body, mind, and beyond. Small habits reach big goals; whether you try to complete 20 books this year by reading for 20 minutes every day or want to complete an Ironman, your habits add up.

What habits would you like to drop/start? Send me a DM to help you with these habits and smash those goals!