How an emergency mini-habit helps your client
When your client is trying to make lifestyle changes to enhance their wellbeing, they want those changes to stick. It’s dispiriting to put effort in, only to find that progress is too difficult to sustain.
As a health professional, you already know that the benefit of habitual behaviour is that once the habit is established, it’s largely governed by automatic processes. Because of this automaticity, habit can prompt action even when someone lacks conscious motivation to act at that moment. Like brushing your teeth – you’ll have done that this morning whether or not you had any deliberate intention of doing it, because the sight of your toothbrush in its familiar place will have been enough to set off the habit sequence.
Once your client has replaced, say, grazing on biscuits throughout the afternoon with a different habit – maybe one planned lovely snack – they don’t have to use much mental space and effort to stick to the new pattern. I’ve written several blogs before about aspects of habit formation, so I’ll summarise some key points here and you can look back over my past blog posts.
Forming new healthy habits
To create a new healthy habit, what’s needed is
- to work out a behavioural sequence of actions that will make up the new habit
- a consistent setting (time of day, place etc) which acts as a cue
- repetitions of the sequence in response to the cue
There’s considerable variation in the number of repetitions for the new habit to become largely automatic, but that’s ok.
Simple and complex habits
Some habits are much more complex than others – complex behaviours are those which contain more subcomponents or steps. We’ll come back to this point a bit later.
What can disrupt habit formation
Repetition is a key factor in habit creation, and consistency is hugely helpful. But we all know that life can get in the way of remembering to do something new, and we can find ourselves falling back on old patterns.
The good news here is that an occasional lapse in repeating the new behavioural sequence doesn’t mean you’re back at square one – picking the new habit up again at the next opportunity is fine.
Starting the new behaviour is more important than completing the whole sequence
There are two phases to each repetition of a habit. The ‘habit instigation’ phase includes the mental processes leading up to performing a particular action. The ‘habit execution’ phase includes all the processes that govern the performance of the action, once you’ve started it up until the action sequence is finished.
This distinction turns out to be very helpful in practice – Gardner (2022) found that whether the habit in question is simple or complex, it’s the instigation of the habit sequence (rather than executing the whole thing) that matters.
You can read Ben Gardner’s article in full as it is fortunately open access, and the link is at the end of this blog, but here I just want to focus on the importance of habit instigation.
How a mini-habit can help
Given that it’s the instigation of the habit sequence that matters, it’s valuable to your client to help them at least start the new habit at every opportunity even if there are times they don’t manage to complete the whole sequence.
Ben Gardner found that instigation of the new habit increased the strength of the habit forming for both simple and complex habits alike.
“Behaviour change interventions should target the formation of instigation habits to promote maintenance, for simple and complex behaviours alike” (Gardner 2022)
There’s an app already available on iOS that emphasises habit instigation
Marco Stojanovic, a behavioural scientist, has developed an app that puts this into practice by creating what he calls an “emergency habit” alongside the regular habit you are trying to establish. So far he has only managed to publish the iOS version of the app so not everyone can access it yet, but if you have an iphone you can download the app for free to help you develop your chosen new habit.
The idea is that when you plan the new regular habit you want to create, you also work out a mini emergency version for days when you can’t do the whole thing. Making the emergency habit something that is really easy to do means that you will be able to instigate the habit even on days when you can’t execute the whole thing. This means that even if you don’t have an iphone you can use the idea. And maybe watch Marco’s youtube video on the app to help you follow the process.
How the emergency habit works
An example to illustrate this is my own attempt to work up to doing Park Run on Saturdays. I live near a particularly lovely Park Run location and thought this would be a good way to increase my fitness. I haven’t got as far as running 40 minutes at one go (which is what I calculated it would take) but, I have gone from hardly ever running anywhere*, to running for 20 minutes three times a week.
For me this is huge. Particularly so because after about 14 weeks of building the habit, I now automatically remember the regular days for running. Most of the 42 repetitions of my new running habit have been the regular 20 minutes, but three times I haven’t been able to do the regular habit and instead did my emergency habit of 2 minutes running on the spot.
The fact of doing the mini emergency habit keeps the instigation of the habit going consistently, even if you don’t execute the entire regular habit. I’m really impressed that such a simple addition to building a new habit works so well.
One of the reasons it helps is that you have still accomplished your habit building on the emergency mini habit days, which means you haven’t failed or fallen off the wagon – you’ve kept going successfully.
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Note
* Anyone following my blogs may recall an earlier blog about a previous burst of enthusiasm for running. That did not sadly persist beyond the end of lockdown, and I’m hoping to sustain my new thrice weekly running habit for longer. The emergency habit is, I hope, going to help this.
Reference
Gardner, B. (2022) Habit and behavioural complexity: habitual instigation and execution as predictors of simple and complex behaviours. Current Research in Behavioural Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crbeha.2022.100081