One Simple Reframe to be More Consistent with any Habit
To become more consistent with habits, I recently came up with a new framework called “Anchor & Connect”. Below, I share how I arrived at it, how it is helping me so far, and how you can use it.
Being consistent with habits is a hard problem.
But I keep trying.
One habit that I consider important is walking for 15 minutes outside every morning.
Getting morning light as part of this has several proven benefits. It improves efficiency in cognitive tasks, helps align us to circadian rhythm, helps sleep better, and is overall a great mood booster.
But I wasn’t being consistent with this habit. Many days, I would start with my daily workflow and skip this habit. Thus, I was losing the above benefits.
Until one day when things changed.
The Key Insight
Earlier this year, on one of those sporadic days where I was doing my morning walk habit, I reached a tree during my walk. I casually glanced at the timer in my watch, and it showed that I had walked 7 minutes and 30 seconds from my home.
That led me to a thought:
If I walk every morning to this tree, touch it, and then go back, that would be my 15 minutes of outside walk!
So, I started that as an experiment, and the results were surprising!
I Reframed My Habit from Walking to Touching the Tree
So, I reframed my habit from:
Walk 15 minutes outside every day.
to
Touch that tree before noon every day.
While it felt like a small reframing, I started seeing that I now became more committed to this habit. Because of that, I became more consistent with it.
Let’s look at the reasons:
1. By using a specific tree, I added an emotional anchor.
This may sound odd, but an emotional connection developed with that specific tree. This became my anchor for this habit.
This is different than a cue such as “keep your walking shoes by the door”. The tree is external (half-a-mile away) and is completely out of sight. But because I formed an emotional connection, I had internalized that anchor.
The anchor object here is the tree, but for other habits it could be any other physical or virtual object: a specific machine in the gym, a pen etc. This could be within your environment or external to your environment.
2. It focuses on a single action by which I connect to the anchor
Walk 15 minutes outside every day is somewhat ambiguous.
Which route do I take? When exactly do I walk? What if it is raining? Does it have to be exactly 15 minutes, or can I go +/- a few minutes?
But my reframed habit is highly specific: there is a particular object I have to touch before noon.
The single action here is touch, but for other habits it could be any other action in the context of the anchor: see, hear, listen, etc.
I also assigned a meaning to this action: e.g., to take a moment of mindfulness and set the intent for the habit & rest of the day.
3. It is more predictable
I know that it takes exactly 15 minutes to complete. Nothing less, nothing more.
This provides some certainty to the human brain. Let’s say the current time is 9:45 AM and my next meeting is at 10:00 AM. No problem. Now, I have better predictability and I don’t have to make any decisions every day.
Introducing the “Anchor & Connect” Habits Framework
Since this change, come rain or shine, I realized I became highly consistent with this habit.
So, I started reflecting on the core elements of this change. This is to mainly to see if we can apply it to other habits.
I see that there are two core aspects of this approach:
- Identify an anchor for the habit (e.g., a tree for the walking habit).
- Identify a single tangible action (e.g., touch) to connect emotionally and interact with this anchor.
Hence, I am calling this the Anchor & Connect framework.
I am in the process of applying this to my other habits. Given my results so far, I believe this is promising to apply for any habit.
Here are a few examples where this could work.
How to Use This Framework
Want to go to the gym every Sunday but not keeping at it? Going to the gym is ambiguous — how long? what do you do once you get there? This kills the consistency.
Instead, identify your most favorite machine in the gym, and reframe this habit to:
Touch <Your-favorite-machine> before noon on Sundays.
Want to journal every night but not keeping at it? Journalling is not a single action. Instead, reframe it to a single tangible action. For example, you could designate a single unique pen to use for your journalling. Reframe your habit to:
Pick up your journalling pen by 9:00 PM every day.
Summary
I believe we can reframe any existing habit to become more consistent in it:
- Take an existing habit, and
- Identify an anchor object (real or visualized) that’s a part of it and form an emotional connection, and
- Identify one tangible action by which you can connect with the anchor.
Do you have similar stories where you reframed a habit to make it less ambiguous and easier to do?
Do you have existing habits where you think you can benefit from this?
Please let me know.
P.S. When I first started writing this, I was thinking about this as “Habit Reframing”. But by writing it down, I realized that while it was reframing, it was too broad of a framework. Writing helped me develop better clarity to identify the 2 core elements of this framework. If you want to improve your clarity through writing, check out my course (I have a couple of spots left):
The Writing Flywheel — For Software Engineering & Product Leaders by J. Kalyana Sundaram on Maven
