On the Fragility of Habits

It doesn’t take much to disrupt a habit once it’s established. Our habitual behaviours are often context specific, triggered to run in response to a particular form of stimuli. Go on a two-week break from work and those routines that run like clockwork go out the window — making it easier to adopt new habits that felt impossible a week before (or lose the thread of good habits that you’d like to keep ) .

Your morning ritual that gets you up, dressed, and out the door can be thrown off by the simple act of leaving your shoes in the wrong place, or running out of shampoo while you’re in the shower. Morning routines are often a chain of habits, each one triggering the next, and one small crack will echo through your morning. Those shoes you left in the wrong spot mean you’re thinking instead of doing, watching the clock to check times and fretting about what needs to be done instead of running through the morning on autopilot. 

Before too long, you’ve walked out the door without your lunch. Or your keys. Or those documents you needed. All because you left your shoes beside the couch, instead of tucking them under your bed. 

Routines get thrown by little things.

Which means unleashing a big change on your life — starting a new job, inviting a partner to cohabitate with you, a major illness — will echo through every habit you’ve built up and disrupt them all. 

The upside: they build fast, and you can connect them to your old habits with a little effort.

The downside: it feels like you’re living in the heart of chaos, and life has spun out of control for a while. Because you’ve got to think and plan to do things again, for the first time in a long while.

And the easiest routines to pick up are usually the ones designed to help you cope and soothe the frustration of all this chaos in your world, rather than the ones that move you forward and thrive in the new normal. 

Rebuilding the useful routines is work, and it pays to do it consciously instead of hoping it’ll come along.