Welcome to Day 4 of the Club 12 Habit-Building Challenge!
Here’s what we’ve covered so far:
Day 1: Pick your most important habit—then shrink it down.
Day 2: Use habit stacking to trigger yourself to action.
Day 3: Make starting your habit frictionless.
Here’s what we’re looking at today…
Master every area of your life.
Anchor your habit with a reward you crave
Why do we keep doing bad habits even when we know they’re bad for us?
Because they give us an immediate spike of dopamine—the brain’s reward chemical.
When you start a good habit, the REAL reward is often months or years away (like: losing 20 pounds, getting promoted, or hitting a revenue target in your business).
And your brain doesn’t like distant rewards.
It likes immediate rewards.
Especially when it comes to forming new habits.
When you’re building new habits, your brain needs an immediate payoff to close the loop and say, “Hey, that was awesome, let’s do that again tomorrow.”
In his book The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg writes about the neurology of habit formation in depth – highlighting a 3-part “Habit Loop” discovered by researchers at MIT.
The loop consists of a Cue (a trigger that reminds you to do your habit), a Routine (the actual habit you want to build), and a Reward.
Without that immediate reward, the basal ganglia—which is the part of your brain that’s responsible for habit formation—won’t lock-in the behavior.1
Actionable insights
Here’s your challenge for today:
Pick a reward your brain can crave as you’re doing the behavior you want to form into a habit. It doesn’t have to be grand, it just needs to be immediate and enjoyable. Here are some examples:
You could give yourself permission to drink your morning coffee or have a snack only after the habit is done.
If you’re building an exercise habit, you could get the most delicious protein powder you can find and reward yourself with it immediately after your workout.
A simple celebration, like dancing in place or saying a celebratory word, like “BOOM” or “YES!” after doing your habit works as well.
If you’re working on building a productivity habit, you might try writing down your most important things to do each day on physical paper (instead of an app) …Because creating a list on actual paper has a built-in reward system—every time you check off a task, you get a little dopamine rush.
Reward yourself immediately after you finish executing your habit (or tiny habit). The goal is to tie the action to an immediate reward.
See you in Day 5,
—Dean
Master every area of your life.
Up next…
Footnotes
Graybiel, A. M. (2008). Habits, rituals, and the evaluative brain. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 31, 359–387.
