If you want to start running each morning, it’s essential that you choose a simple cue (say, keep your running shoes and clothes next to your bed) and allow yourself a clear reward (say, a sense of accomplishment from recording your miles or timings, or say savour the endorphin rush you get from a jog). But a cue and a reward, on their own are not enough for a new habit to last. Only when your brain starts expecting that reward – craving for the sense of accomplishment or for the endorphins – will it become automatic. The cue, in addition to triggering a routine, must also trigger a craving, and a new habit is thus formed.

Every habit abides by a set of rules, and when you understand those rules, you gain influence over them. Any habit can be changed. However, individuals and habits are all different, and so the specifics of diagnosing and changing the patterns in our lives differ from person to person and behaviour to behaviour. What’s more, each person’s habits are driven by different cravings. Understanding how habit formation occurs. Understanding your own habits and identifying the components of your habit loops, enables you to look for ways to supplant old cues or bad habits, with new routines and better habits.

Habits aren’t destiny, they can be ignored, changed or replaced. To do so requires you to deliberately fight the habit, by finding a new routine to follow between the cue and the reward. For instance, once we develop a routine of sitting on the couch, rather than exercising, or snacking whenever we pass the snack container or the refrigerator, those patterns always remain in our heads. Habits never really disappear, so to change the habit, we need to take control of the habit loop and by creating new neurological routines to overpower the old habits, we can soon make the new routines, to exercise or to ignore the snacks, become as automatic as any other habit.

20 years ago conventional wisdom held, that the best way for people to lose weight was to radically alter their lives. By following strict diets, joining a gym and incorporating changes in their daily routines such as climbing stairs instead of using an elevator. Only by completely shaking up someone’s life, the thinking went, could their bad habits be reformed. But, over prolonged periods, these methods did not work. Piling on so much change at once made it impossible for any of it to stick.

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