While popular wisdom suggests that establishing a habit is the key to all self improvement, ending them may be equally - if not more - critical.

I’ve been in a rut for a long time. Old habits aren’t as stable and progress is slow. I miss swaths of time, and getting back to the routine just doesn’t happen as smoothly as it once did.

As I diagnose this issue I have to acknowledge how much my core habits have changed. Meditation was something I did after showering. I now practice it between writing sets. Exercise started as a rowing habit as soon as I got up. It’s now morphed into cardio, indoor climbing, or walking - something I get around to “at some point” in the day.

This “habit drift” is necessary. When efficiently leveling up a habit, both the trigger and response eventually have to change. I might practice several skills in writing depending on the day. If I joined a Crossfit class, the trigger will probably differ from my original home workout habit.

The only behaviors that are as rock solid as when I began – flossing and planning – don’t require any skill pushes. But for all the others, I’ll naturally mess around with triggers and their respective responses to grow. That makes the “habit fold” in my head less crisp, less automatic, and the habit degrades. The more you efficiently push a skill, the more inevitable this issue becomes.

I’ll call this the Habit Advancement Paradox.

The Habit Advancement Paradox:

When efficiently leveling up skills, automaticity degrades.
Or
Either habit automaticity remains stable or skills continue to advance.

“Efficiently” is a a key word here.

While I believe there’s natural growth that occurs, and you can extend that by forcing progress, it’s hard to get further without doing something extra – going to a different type of gym or joining a community. When that happens, it can feel like the ground is falling out from under you as once solid behaviors fade – even though you’re doing the right thing. You’re left scrabbling, tapping into willpower reserves in a way you never had to before to maintain the routine. After a certain point, what’s efficient for progress isn’t optimal for habits (and vice versa).

A NEW MODEL

I assumed that all skill pushes should be done under the auspices of the original habit. This appears unsustainable. Perhaps the answer lies in viewing progress as something larger than habits.

A “habit” is a singular, automatic trigger-response behavior. I define a “routine” as a sequence of habits chained across one day. What I need is a term for a collection of sequential, related habits and skill pushes across years that lead to mastery.

Let’s call that a “lifestyle”.

In this new paradigm, ending habits is just as important as forming them. It solves the Habit Advancement Paradox.

Take meditation. If I focus on triggers, my meditation habit was tied to:

Showering
At some point in the day
Random classes/community sessions
Between sets of writing

Going to class never stuck - and why would it? It’s not at all related to the initial habit I formed. Yet many of the changed triggers were conducive to skill growth. I moved the habit later in the day to accommodate more intense 40 - 60 minutes sessions. Community practice got me meditating in different styles, and short sets between writing forced me to work on quickly and consistently reaching states.

All this messed with automaticity. What would’ve been better is if I deliberately destroyed and reformed the habit to parallel different triggers and preserve the automaticity of the practice itself.

Knowing when exactly to do this is difficult. I think the answer lies when they’ve grown to the point of diminishing returns. And there seems to be a progression to the efficient, most effortless growth of any skill:

A Tiny Habit (establishing the initial habit)
A natural extension (the skill just naturally grows before plateauing)
Some sort of forced growth under the same trigger (the easiest growth I’ve found is to either go really tiny and intense or cycle through different types of training)

After number 3, it’s pretty clear that progress just stalls. There’s a limit to which you can wring out growth with the same trigger. There’s also a degradation in automaticity because you’re not making any meaningful progress. This might be the right time to reestablish a new, related habit on the path to mastery over a lifestyle. And I’d eyeball this at about 3 months.

Not only is three months enough time to establish and level up a habit twice (through natural and forced growth), but it’s also a nice way to divide the year into quarters. It also tends to be how long I shoot for with challenges. And there’s usually some sort of disturbance in my life within that time frame which degrades automaticity anyways (like holidays or travel).

TROUBLESHOOTING

There are still some theoretical problems with this new model.

The biggest issue is that restarting new habits is, once again, going to drain willpower. Most of the time starting a habit efficiently isn’t problematic because it starts so tiny. But when you’re ratcheting things up that might not be an option. There’s not a place, say, for going to a group meditation and just showing up for 10 minutes. However, I’d argue that a part of that load will eventually be taken up by other Elements of Change - specifically socializing and expectation. I think there’s still going to be a bit of awkwardness and a difficult start in the beginning, but I’m hoping it won’t be too much of an issue.

IMPLEMENTATION

If I were to implement this, I’d first kill off exercise and mobilizing. Exercise has been the hardest hit by changeups, and mobilizing was always something I did after exercising. A part of my implementation would involve planning to naturally grow it, how to force grow, and a plan to kill it off in three months. I’d think about how to periodize this across a year, much like bodybuilders do with macrocycles.

It still feels wrong. Even though many of my habits are tattered and worn, they’re still precious multi-year behaviors. Shooting them out back like Old Yeller is nerve wracking.

LARGER BENEFITS

I’m drawn to this paradigm for larger reasons. Productivity isn’t everything (gasp!).

There’s a reason why a “routine” connotes boringness. There is something inherently inhuman about strict adherence to a program. And that’s how I feel when churning through habits over years, especially when progress inevitably plateaus. Yet I cannot shake how valuable routines are.

However, change, newness, and novelty are all joy producing and life affirming. And they’re agile.

There’s always been a trade off in self-help - discipline to accomplish goals on one hand, and the random enjoyment that has so often led me astray on the other.

But there have been a few times where I’ve been able to fuse the two. Structured Randomness comes to mind, with its use of Novelty to bolster productivity. Similarly, “jot-outlining” and “scamping” in process composition joins creative freedom with structure. Structured Relaxation and Planned Mediocrity also carry a whiff of this union of opposites.

When I imagine a macrocycle divided into quarters where I get to run, rock climb, do yoga, and box, while making sure to build those up into strong automatic habits, I kind’ve get excited. I know I’ll always be adapting and growing. I’ll never feel dull. And I’ll be able to make them as effortless and automatic as possible.

Killing habits might be the best way to have your cake and eat it too.

photocred: tree in stump by Tim Snell, bulldozer by MINING.com, periodization chart by paddlers guide.wordpress.com