Are They Different and Does it Matter?
I have spent a lot of time recently thinking about habits and the role they play in our lives. Habits are a critical part of our neurophysiology that helps us to manage semi-autonomous activity without engaging the cognitive parts of our brain. This is essentially an energy conservation strategy that evolved early in the history of vertebrates, perhaps 500 million years ago, showing the central role habits play in our survival. Our abilities to eat, drink, walk and chew gum are controlled by the habit centers of the brain.
Developing and managing habits is key to being productive and improving our lives on a daily basis. If we have strongly embedded habits that we eat well, exercise, and all the other assorted activities we rely on to form the basis of good health, then we conserve energy for other even more productive activities for the cognitive centers of our brain to focus on.
But I have also felt a conflict between habits we execute automatically and the goal-directed activities we undertake logically. It makes sense to me that we can condition our response to cues for specific actions and relieve the conscious thought required. For example, if we set our alarm to wake a 5 am and we condition our self to throw back the covers and get out of bed, and we repeat this action every day for months and years, it will become a habit requiring no further interference from the goal centered part of our brain. Indeed, our natural physiological cycles will also adapt to this routine, aligning our circadian rhythms to the pattern.
Habits are more strongly formed when the cue is very frequent, and the habit is executed very consistently.
If you only get up at 5 am on weekdays, and sleep late on weekends, you are forcing conscious thought to intervene to ensure you get out of bed on Monday morning. And of course, you feel groggy and disoriented the whole day. If our daily activities require constant intervention in order to do what we plan to do in order to achieve the goals we want to achieve, we are expending energy on just managing our lives; we will have little energy remaining to advance our more critical activities.
Where the habit is not strongly embedded, either because you are trying to create a new habit, the habit cue occurs infrequently, or you have not been consistent enough to ingrain the habit, you will need to develop routines to act as a safety net.
In this context, I will use "routine" to mean a sequence of planned activities you want to execute in order to achieve some goal or objective. The routine could incorporate several habits that help to get through sequence successfully.
To illustrate the difference, I wake every weekday at 5am. The sequence of activities I go through each morning is a routine of activities, each of which is executed autonomously but the sequence requires some intervention to ensure I go through the whole series of activities. Skipping an activity generally results in some regret. If I fail to warm up and stretch correctly before running, inevitably I will suffer more aches and pains and I chastise myself for not preparing correctly.
Thus, the whole sequence of activities is a routine and not a habit. Because there are many activities in the sequence and the routine takes about 2 hours to complete, it is not likely this whole sequence can ever be truly habitual. I have anecdotally observed the process has become easier with time, so it is possible the cognitive energy expended will continue to gradually decrease.
From this I conclude there is a very concrete difference between routine and habit. So how do we use this difference to help us make improvements in our lives?
If we are attempting to make a change to an existing habit, we need to understand what drives the habit, identify the cue that initiates our response. Then we need to create the response we want to encourage, and ensure we follow this new sequence.
For example, it is common to take a break during the middle of the morning and join colleagues for a coffee. You have decided you want to forego the habit of adding a bagel to your order every morning in order to help control your waistline. The cue may be the time and social environment of the coffee break and the associated craving may be triggered by the sight and smell of the donut while waiting in line for the coffee to be served.
Then we need to create a new routine that replaces this habit. You could accomplish this by scheduling some other activity at the time you normally break for coffee. By time-blocking this time in your schedule you give your conscious mind control over the schedule rather than automatically being triggered to break for coffee.
When we set a new objective that requires consistent and repeated effort over time, we will always need to analyze the objective for the sequence of activities we need to perform. So, let’s imagine we are starting a new job that requires us to be in the office promptly every day at 8am. We want to exercise every day and take the dog for a walk. We need to shower and dress for the office. We want to journal because that makes us feel grounded. We want to have a good breakfast and we need to feed the dog. Then we have to commute for 20 minutes.
The plan you create will be one or more routines that will require some amount of conscious intervention every day, perhaps for months or years. You will need to determine when to set the alarm and address how you will overcome the urge to slap the snooze button three times. You will have to decide how you will choose your wardrobe for the day, perhaps by choosing your clothes the evening before. You may prepare the coffee the night before as well.
While each of the tasks we need to perform individually may be a habit, the sequence of activities is a routine. We have been brushing our teeth since we were small children; that is likely a habit. Getting dressed we can likely accomplish “with our eyes closed”.
We may to make individual choices about each of these tasks. Running may bea habit but the route may need to change in order to accommodate the schedule. This new route will become a habit in due time, to the point of knowing every hill and turn.
This planning activity is the analysis required to implement any new routine. Early in the process, you may need to convince yourself to persist in completing all the activities. “I think I may skip my run this morning”, or, “I’ll grab a quick bagel at the office”. This is your conscious-self attempting to intervene to defeat your routines. Because routines are not habits, they need to have the force of planning behind them.
Before encountering the event, it helps to visualize in advance making the choice you want to make. This can precondition your conscious to choose the path you want rather than choosing the path of least resistance. As you repeat these visualizations and execute the path you intend, you strengthen habits that will sustain the routine. In time you may see the energy required to execute the routine decreases and the urge to skip steps lessens.
For example, I find that preparing for the 5am alarm helps to ensure that my conscious mind does not interfere with excuses. I visualize myself throwing back the covers when the alarm sounds. It feels like this “blocks” the temptation to silence the alarm from overwhelming my good intentions.
Once you actually start the activity it may require further effort to sustain the activity to completion. I found this effect in attempting to increase the distance I run. I set a goal to reach 10km at least once per week. But every time I pushed myself to increase my distance, my conscious mind found opportunities to create excuses to stop at distances I found comfortable.
Thus, routines are planned sequences of activities we create in order to dictate to our conscious-mind how we will manage the habits we want to encourage, eliminate the habits we want to discourage and to avoid the excuses our conscious mind will attempt to make to conserve energy. It is this relationship between habits and routines that provide alignment between the development of good habits and the structure to achieve our goals.