What Exactly Is a Habit?

Habits Are Essentially the Brain’s Energy-Saving Strategy

For any positive change to be sustainable, the formation of habits is crucial. This is because willpower is a limited resource. While it plays a significant role in short-term self-management and goal achievement, behaviors maintained purely by willpower tend to fade over time.

Habits are fundamentally the brain’s way of conserving energy. By establishing habits, we transform positive behaviors that require conscious effort into automatic routines, thereby freeing up valuable willpower to tackle life’s challenges and ensuring that positive actions become long-lasting.

Habits Follow a Loop of Cue, Craving, Response, and Reward

Habit formation expert James Clear, in his book Atomic Habits, points out that all habits go through the same sequence of four stages: Cue, Craving, Response, and Reward.

• Cue: An external or internal signal that draws attention to a potential reward.
• Craving: The cue triggers a craving for a specific reward.
• Response: The craving prompts a specific behavior in pursuit of the reward.
• Reward: The behavior results in an immediate reward, satisfying the craving and creating a link between the cue and the reward, thus reinforcing the habit loop.

These four steps form a neurological feedback loop—cue, craving, response, reward; cue, craving, response, reward… This cycle repeats until it becomes an automatic behavior pattern.

For example, let’s say you have a habit of checking social media during work breaks. First, the cue might be feeling bored or stressed while working. This feeling triggers a craving for a brief moment of relaxation—you want to escape from work for a while. Then, you respond to this craving by picking up your phone and performing a simple response—opening social media. After scrolling for a while, you see some interesting content and feel relaxed and happy, which is the reward. This reward subconsciously reinforces the idea that social media is a good way to relax, solidifying this behavior pattern in your brain. As you repeat this process, the habit gradually becomes automatic.

Micro-Habits: Rolling a Snowball of Health with Small Investments

Micro-habits are a simple, small-scale behavior change strategy proposed by Stephen Guise in his book Mini Habits. The concept has gained widespread popularity globally. Micro-habits work by setting easily achievable small goals, lowering the barrier to action, and gradually cultivating new habits. For example, if you want to start exercising, micro-habits suggest starting with just one push-up a day, rather than immediately creating a complex workout plan.

The power of micro-habits lies in their ease of initiation and consistency, allowing you to enjoy the compounding benefits of good habits over time—consistently improving by 1% each day can make you 37 times better in a year, while a 1% decline each day could virtually erase your progress.