Bridging the Gap: From Who You Are to Who You Want to Be

Do you ever feel a gap between the person you are today and the person you aspire to be? Perhaps you envision yourself working out regularly, eating healthier, learning a new skill, or dedicating more time to your passions instead of distractions. It's a common experience to feel that achieving these goals requires you to become an entirely different person—someone consistently disciplined, effortlessly motivated, and full of willpower.

You might have tried your hardest to embody this ideal, and perhaps it worked for a while. But then, you found yourself slipping back into old patterns, leading to frustration and self-annoyance with every perceived failure. The prevailing narrative often suggests that if you don't succeed, you simply didn't want it enough. However, the truth is, change is genuinely hard. Understanding why it's hard can make your journey much easier.

Your Brain's Jungle: The Highways of Habit

Imagine your brain as a lush, dense jungle. Moving through it to make a decision or initiate an action is like navigating an actual jungle: it's challenging and demands energy. Your brain, being an energy-saver, has developed a clever trick: every action and behavior you repeat leaves a path in this mental jungle.

When you first start something new, you're essentially trampling down plants, creating rough, improvised trails. The more often you repeat that action, the more pronounced the trail becomes. Over time, it transforms into an easier-to-tread path, which you then take more frequently, eventually turning it into a street. With years of repetition, this street becomes a superhighway. Traversing it becomes effortless, familiar, and comfortable.

The more established these brain highways become, the more you gravitate towards their comfort. This means you tend to do what you've always done. This is precisely why change is so difficult, especially as an adult, when your mental jungle is criss-crossed with countless established streets and highways.

To truly understand how these highways are built, you need to distinguish between two key concepts: routines and habits.

The Things You Do: Routines vs. Habits

Routines: The Wise Planner at Work

A routine is a sequence of actions you carry out the same way every time because they've proven effective for you. For instance, you might consistently use the same ingredients and cooking order for your favorite dish because you love the result. Or, before bed, you set your alarm for 6:30 AM because that's when you want to wake up.

Think of routines as being executed by a wise planner within your mind. This planner is slow, analytical, and responsible for strategizing and mental calculations. It's aware of your future goals and carefully considers what kind of outcome you desire. Based on this, it chooses actions to achieve specific results, even if those actions feel uncomfortable at first, like taking a cold shower after waking up.

Routines are conscious choices, driven by your goals and intentions.

Habits: The Impulsive Toddler on Autopilot

Routines can eventually evolve into habits, which feel much easier because they are essentially a sequence of actions carried out without conscious thought. You've done them so often that your brain considers them rewarding and an excellent response to a particular situation. A habit can feel like you're operating on autopilot; you don't have to convince yourself to do it—you just do.

The crucial aspect of habits is that they are set in motion by triggers. These are context cues, which can be single things or entire situations, that signal your brain to start a specific behavior or action.

You already have many triggers in your life:

• Seeing your phone often leads you to unlock the screen.
• Sitting in a car prompts you to reach for the seatbelt.
• Buying your morning coffee might also trigger you to get a cookie, even if you're not hungry.

Habits are executed by an impulsive toddler within your mind. This toddler responds to your immediate desires based on your surroundings, without considering any longer-term goals. For the toddler, the future doesn't exist, and it dislikes hard work. So, when it notices a trigger, it steers you down that easy road in your brain, leading to a familiar, rewarding result. If you get coffee, the toddler also wants the cookie, simply because that's what you do every morning.

This rewarding feeling is often how many of your less desirable habits began: chocolate tastes good, browsing social media is occasionally entertaining. You repeat these actions because of the associated reward, even if they aren't good for you in the long run. Rewarding feelings demand repetition, and thus, a bad habit is born.

While the toddler might sound like a built-in sabotage mechanism, it's just as important as the wise planner, and they actually work together most of the time! You need your wise planner for complex tasks like thinking big thoughts, parallel parking, or doing your taxes. However, letting your wise planner handle everything would consume too much energy. Outsourcing mundane and repetitive tasks to habits, managed by the toddler, allows your brain to efficiently manage your daily life while simultaneously tackling more complex mental challenges.

This understanding is powerful: if you want to introduce a new, positive behavior into your life, you can actually use these energy-saving mechanisms to make it easier for yourself.

How to Build a Habit: Guiding Your Toddler and Planner

Instead of aiming for massive, overwhelming changes, focus on small, incremental improvements. Improving your life a little bit is far more effective than aiming high and changing nothing. Small changes, consistently applied, can lead to significant transformations over months and years.

To make change easier, the best approach isn't to force it with sheer willpower, but to convince your brain that it's not a big deal. This involves creating new routines and then gradually turning them into habits. You want your wise planner to construct that initial trail, and then enlist your toddler to help initiate the action effortlessly.

Let's say your goal is to work out to be fitter—a very common aspiration. The first step is to break down this vague goal into clear, separate actions. The idea is to make the action itself as easy a threshold as possible: so small it's manageable, and so specific that you don't have to think about it much.

For example, a tangible, controllable action might be “doing ten squats” every morning. You can start by trying to create a routine, but already include clear triggers that your toddler can pick up later on.

The Power of Triggers

Remember, a trigger is simply a signal you consistently associate with an action. These can be:

• Visual pointers: Seeing a specific object, like your training outfit.
• A certain time of day: 8 AM every morning.
• A designated place: Your living room, or a nearby park.
• A combination of these.

The important thing is that you always start your action in a specific context. This trigger acts as the start button that will eventually set off the action automatically.

So, to establish a home workout habit with ten squats, you could make sure to always do them with your exercise gear on, in your living room, at 8 AM. Once you have your trigger and action, all you need to do is repeat them regularly, ideally every day. If you keep going, they will transform from a routine into a habit, from a trail to a highway. The squats will still require energy to perform, but the decision to do them will feel much less like a chore and more like a regular part of your day.

Making Habits Stick: The Pleasure Principle

While this process is simple, it's not always easy. Many things you want to turn into habits don't offer the instant gratification that, say, browsing social media does. To make your new action easier to repeat and more likely to be picked up by the toddler, try to make it pleasurable. This doesn't necessarily mean rewarding yourself after you do it, but by making the action or behavior itself more enjoyable.

Consider these ideas:

• Only listen to your favorite podcast while working out.
• Chip away at a less enjoyable task (like taxes) while you wait for something else to load.

You need to figure out what works best for you to infuse enjoyment into the new behavior.

The Journey of Habit Formation

In principle, that's it. It's frustratingly simple, like many things you can do to improve your life. How long it takes for your toddler to take over and establish a habit varies widely. It depends on the specific behavior you're trying to adopt, your personality, your stress levels, and many other factors. It can take anywhere between 15 and 250 days for a new habit to be automatically kicked off by its trigger. You won't know exactly how long it will take for you.

Starting is often the easy part, especially in the first week or two. The real challenge lies in continuing to do it every day. But here's the encouraging news: it does get easier as you keep going.

There are no silver bullets for change, but the science of habits is a powerful reminder that it is possible, no matter your age. Even if you only end up doing a little more good stuff or a few new things, that's still a success. Being a little bit healthier or more knowledgeable is infinitely better than being unhappy about something and changing nothing. Ultimately, change is a direction, not a destination.

Your Companion on the Journey

Now that you have some insight and motivation, remember that you don't need to buy anything to work on yourself. However, if you find yourself struggling with change, a structured approach can be incredibly helpful. Many find that a dedicated habit journal can be a powerful tool.

Such a journal can guide you through the hardest parts of the process step-by-step. You'll get helpful pointers, reflect on your progress, and discover ways to make things easier for yourself. Regular journaling, interwoven with examples, scientific insights, and reflections, can keep your journey interesting and help you track your habit progress for your desired behaviors. It can become a beautiful companion on your personal change journey, however small or big it may be.