The Cycle of Habit Building: 3 key takeaways for consistent goal progress
Building habits is hard. For everyone.
And it’s not just because the habits that you’re trying to build are hard. It’s also because change and growth are weird, uncomfortable, ambiguous areas.
One thing I’ve found helpful in problem solving and navigating through ambiguous areas like habit-building and goal-setting is to look for patterns in the weeds. Signs of structure, repetition, consistency.
By identifying structure, we can then take steps toward analyzing, identifying bottlenecks, and poking around for efficiencies and new ways of doing things.
In this article, I’ll outline the cycle in which we try to build new habits, as well as the implications in each stage of the cycle for taking better approaches toward stronger habit maintenance.
Let’s get started!
The Cycle of Habit Building
From my trials in pursuing healthful habits over the years, I’ve gone through a lot of trial and error: a lot of habits that never stuck, others that I’ve had to relearn repeatedly, and others that were so successful I now consider an unmoving part of my lifestyle.
The habits I’ve experimented with have ranged from working out more consistently and controlling my financial spending to more ‘meta’ areas like curbing perfectionist paralysis (representative of habits in the form of thought patterns as opposed to physical activities).
However, no matter the type of habit or level of difficulty, I’ve noticed that there exists a perpetual cycle of habit-building that we all progress through.
The general cycle goes as follows:
1. Dissatisfaction: unsatisfied with current state, a burning desire to change
2. Ideation: Contemplating ideas for change, met with friction to take action
3. Action: Planning and attempting, optimism & manic EXCITEMENT!
4. Slump: Habits prove difficult, loss of routine, drive & progress
5. Re-enter…
Dissatisfaction (1): Rinse & repeat from scratch,
OR
Action (3): Apply learnings from failure and sustain progress
Stage 1: Dissatisfaction
In this stage, we hold discontentment regarding something about our current state; our fitness or health level, our financial situation, etc.
This discontent can sprout from internal awareness of your situation or external sources of validation, judgement, or criticism.
We begin to feel a desire to change but are likely overwhelmed by the perceived amount of work involved in changing or we don’t feel an urgent need to improve in our current state.
Though the discontentment and desire to change ‘burns’ within, sadly, this stage becomes the permanent stage for those who aren’t exposed to that ‘thing’ that makes them decide to take action; a catalyst.
This is because we can get used to the burn, so long as it’s not too painful or obnoxious.
However, for those who experience a catalyst for change and find that they’re dreaming of a better state, they enter stage 2…
Stage 2: Ideation
When you’re in ideation, your catalyst for change is enabling you to dream about where you could be.
Here, we’re contemplating what our areas of change could look like and how we could get there.
But even with this new found awareness, we still face friction holding us back from taking action.
This friction to action typically manifests from general confusion of how to go about improving our situation, as well as sheer overwhelm from the amount of work we perceive in making life-altering habit changes. If our ideal states look that good, it mustn’t be easy, right?
As this stage progresses, so long as our change catalyst remains present and strong in our minds, we normalize ourselves to the idea of where we could be and start to build realistic expectations on ourselves.
Starting with small habits to gain momentum, we effectively reduce the friction to action from confusion and overwhelm and begin to enter the ideal stage 3…
Stage 3: Action
In this stage, we’re finally taking action and making strides toward our habits and goals.
When we’ve hit a good stride with our progress, we then start to feel over-optimistic, almost manic about our successes. Here, it’s easy to convince ourselves that this heightened level of progress can sustain itself forever.
However, once things prove unsustainable, difficult to maintain (believe me, they will!), our expectations for progress start to become misaligned with the progress we actually realize.
Thus, we enter stage 4…
Stage 4: Slump
Habits fall off, motivation and confidence dip, progress stalls, you know the drill…
These failures can come from internal or external sources.
Internal failures represent lack of motivation, discipline, willingness to learn, or any combination of the like.
On the other hand, external failures usually relate to uncontrollable, unpredictable factors like sporadic life events and schedules.
Here’s where things can take a turn!
In stage 5, we will either…
Re-enter (1) Dissatisfaction.. OR.. Re-enter (3) Action
If we throw in the towel by not taking the conscious effort to analyze why we failed and apply our learnings, we re-enter the dissatisfaction stage. Unfortunately, this is the popular path for most of us.
By re-entering the dissatisfaction stage, we then need to wait for another change catalyst to push us into the subsequent stage of ideation and so on; we’re essentially introducing more variables and starting from scratch.
However, if we take a conscious approach to understanding why we failed and how to regain momentum, we can re-enter the action stage and reignite our engines for sustained progress.
Our job is to weigh how much of each failure is attributable to which source (internal or external), if they were preventable, and how to mitigate them when they arrive next time around.
Given this structured view of habit-building, how do we go about taking better actions toward habit maintenance?
Let’s review a few key takeaways!
3 Key Takeaways from the Cycle of Habit Building
1. What matters most is what you do in the SLUMP.
Habit maintenance depends almost entirely on what happens after you enter the SLUMP.
After any period of action, persistent effort, motivation, you’re bound to hit a wall. These failures are inevitable.
Therefore, our success depends, not on our ability to prevent failures from happening, but on our ability to anticipate, plan, and learn from failures.
In a related article, I outlined the biggest reason causing most of us to fail in habit maintenance: our tendency for a ‘clean the slate’ approach where we gravitate toward re-entering the dissatisfaction stage and starting from scratch instead of analyzing failures to re-enter the action stage.
Hit the slump, but get back up! Making progress is an iterative process.
2. Because catalysts for change can also be internal, you can instigate them yourself through awareness & ownership
External catalysts are unpredictable and sometimes difficult to internalize or parse (e.g., receiving criticism or judgement from someone that pricks a soft spot in you and causes you to reflect for the better).
Knowing how to parse through criticism and embrace vulnerability is a difficult skill on its own, closely related to curbing perfectionism and allowing yourself to ‘be the dumbest person in the room’.
With a greater number of variables inevitably comes greater variability, and this makes it all the more difficult to instigate the transition from dissatisfaction to ideation.
Most of the time, we sit unaware of what we can improve. Our burning desires for change rarely grow to extreme amplitudes to force us to change on their own.
On the other hand, building self-awareness, objectivity, and ownership (being your own judge) can act as the necessary internal catalyst to spark transition.
With enough practice, we can willingly navigate the cycle with awareness of where we are and what we need to do to progress and sustain habits. We also become less likely to blame barriers to success on external factors as we take charge of our own success through accountability.
3. To accelerate progress, actively reduce friction to action
By reducing the distance between you and any positive habit (measured in units of perceived effort required), you’re less likely to break habits because of a lack of motivation, discipline, or time.
The idea behind environment design is to create guardrails in your environment (home, work, play, etc.) to encourage positive, healthful habits and discourage negative ones.
Looking to workout more? Pack a bag with ALL of your gym things in it, ready to go by the door at all times. Leave the yoga mat laying on your floor instead of packing it up each time you need to start a session.
Trying to minimize snack consumption? Media consumption? Place snacks (or the TV remote!) in hard to reach places.
Sounds ‘hacky’, I know.
But the idea behind environment design also relates to the idea of making tasks feel new and exciting to spark interest. Keep yourself on your toes!
Slacking on writing that book or blog? Look for a new, maybe even aesthetically-pleasing and functional writing app to get the ball rolling.
To cap this analysis off, let’s be clear on this one final takeaway:
The point isn’t to get out of the cycle; it’s to understand how we can optimize our actions and awareness within each stage of the cycle.
Through conscious effort to understand failures and the scope of our ability to impact them, we instill greater self-awareness and habit maintenance.
Embrace the cycle!
Thanks for reading! Before you go…
Be sure to give a clap, a follow and feel free to share if you’ve got any ideas to add for building habits and traversing the cycle!
Also, keep a lookout for articles on The Mental Factory that I’ve got coming spanning accountability & tracking systems; excited to share!
Stay safe and I’ll see you in the next one! 👋
