Recently, I watched Sanju, a Hindi biopic movie apparently based on the life of Indian actor Sanjay Dutt. In a monologue in the movie, there is this line by Ranbir Kapoor who is portraying Sanjay Dutt. Here let me quote that in English – “The first time I took drugs, ‘cause I was upset with dad. The second time, ‘cause my mom was sick. By the third time, I was a drug addict”

Pretty easy way to get addicted, right? In fact, there are many who get addicted to bad habits in just a couple of ‘trials’. So the above addiction seems quite reasonable, doesn’t it?

Now let’s come up with some similar Ranbir Kapoor lines but relating to a good habit, let’s say ‘Waking up early’!

“The first time I woke up early, ‘cause I had an exam. The second time, ‘cause I had to board a morning flight. By the third time, I was an early riser.”

How reasonable did this one sound? Not reasonable enough I guess. Well, we all at some point in our life have tried to develop this habit for good. Some succeeded with consistent efforts and others did not. But we would all agree that it’s definitely far more difficult than developing a bad habit which takes almost no effort.

But why this differences in efforts between these two set of habits?

Well, in simple words, it is basically due to the tendency of our brain to be in a comfort zone and seek immediate reward for whatever we do. If we do something that we haven’t done before or something that doesn’t please our brain, the brain takes it to be unimportant or treats it as a threat until it is convinced that whatever we are doing has a reward and does not harm us.

Now, for bad habits, the rewards for the brain are almost immediate. Take drug addiction for instance; someone takes drugs, he/she gets “high” and feel pleasure and his/her stress level decreases temporarily but almost immediately. And thus brain easily falls prey to this bad habit.

But when it comes to good habits, it’s not that simple and we all know it. It’s not easy to convince our brain to leave the immediate comfort of the bed for whatever good reason we are wanting to make the habit of waking up early. And this applies to almost every good habits that we tend to start for the first time. And in most cases, to develop a good habit we need to step out of our comfort zone and this becomes the difficult part as our own brain starts resisting the change!

So what do we do then?

For most of us, the approach that we are suggested basically includes ‘exercising self-control and increasing willpower’ to break bad habits or motivations to develop good ones. And it’s very rare that this actually works in long run. Self-control, willpower, motivations are no doubt important factors but they don’t help to meet the crave that is actually driving the bad habit itself. If someone has a tendency to smoke whenever he is stressed, his problem is not smoking, the actual problem is the stress that is driving him to smoke. But people put all their effort onto stopping to smoke without giving much attention to the stress. And when they are stressed, they give in to the temptations of smoking after few deliberate efforts for avoiding it.

Charles Duhigg, in his book ‘The Power of Habit’ writes about the ‘habit loop’ and many researches that have been conducted in the past on habits. However, the core concept of his book is the ‘Golden Rule of habit change’. And this concept is not just practical but with some effort, we can even replace a bad habit with a good one. Let’s see what this rule actually says: