Learn why forming habits so easily fails and how you can prevail

First off, it’s critical to note that if your 2024 New Year’s Resolutions went the way of the dodo, you’re not a failure and you’re not a quitter. Rather, you’ve simply been missing a key element to habit formation all this time… and it all comes down to hacking your brain and giving it what it wants.

That sounds easy enough, right? Well, it is actually. Let’s find out how this process works from the world’s leading expert on habit formation…

According to Dr. Wendy Wood, author and Provost Professor of Psychology and Business at the University of Southern California, three elements make up a habit: a repetition, a stable behavior, and a reward.

Reward yourself into a habit—what’s not to like?

The problem is when you leave out that last critical element: the reward.

And I’d venture to say the reward bit is even more important for folks who have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Why? Because we need the hit of dopamine that a reward gives us in order to keep our chronically dropping motivation going. It’s that happy little hit of dopamine that helps habit memories form and stick.

It’s Science!

For the insatiably curious among you, here’s a short primer on dopamine according to the Cleveland Clinic:

“Dopamine is known as the “feel-good” hormone. It gives you a sense of pleasure. It also gives you the motivation to do something when you’re feeling pleasure. Dopamine is part of your reward system. This system is designed, from an evolutionary standpoint, to reward you when you’re doing the things you need to do to survive — eat, drink, compete to survive and reproduce. As humans, our brains are hard-wired to seek out behaviors that release dopamine in our reward system. When you’re doing something pleasurable, your brain releases a large amount of dopamine. You feel good and you seek more of that feeling.”

Did you know dopamine played such a critical role in forming habits? I sure didn’t! Given the above explanation, can you see why adding that final reward for a habit well formed is so important?

Put succinctly: if you don’t pair a reward with the new habit you hope to form, you likely won’t stick with it.

Ah, those pesky New Year’s Resolutions again…

And it’s a major reason why all those hope-infused New Year’s Resolutions seem to crap out by the end of January. I know mine have. And it’s so frustrating. And that frustration can easily turn into feelings of failure, which makes you less likely to want to try making new habits in the future. It’s a vicious cycle, really.

But let’s get off that merry-go-round of self-pity and regret, shall we? And how about we jump on the freight train to a 2025 filled with resolutions that give us better health, lasting relationships, and greater success. Now that sounds rather lovely, doesn’t it?

What the heck is a habit, anyway?

Dr. Wood happens to be the world’s leading expert on habit formation. What is her definition of a “habit”? In a conversation with Michaela Barnett at BehavioralScientist.org, she explained it this way:

“Habits are a learning mechanism. All we have to do is repeat something and get rewarded for it, and we’re learning a habit. In research that I’ve done, we find that about 43 percent of what people do every day is repeated in the same context, usually while they are thinking about something else. They’re automatically responding without really making decisions. And that’s what a habit is. A habit is a sort of a mental shortcut to repeat what we did in the past that worked for us and got us some reward.”

Beware of the pitfall of assuming habit formation has anything to do with self-control. It doesn’t. Again, it’s simply repetition of a behavior in the same context at the same time with a nice little dopamine-induced reward tucked in there at the end to really drive the habit formation home.

What does this all boil down to really? Well, neuroscience. When you figure out how to work with your dopamine production instead of against it, you can hack your brain into all sorts of good habits.

And when forming those fabulous new habits, you want to remove as many obstacles and distractions as possible. One well known hack in the ADHD community is to dress for the day in your exercise clothes and put on your exercise sneakers the moment you wake up. That way you’ll remove the barrier of not having the right clothes on when the motivation kicks in to exercise.

Confession time: daily exercise has historically been a real weak point for me for my entire life. But I plan to use this new neuroscience to hack my way into forming a lasting habit. I won’t bore you with the details of why I’ve found it so difficult to stick to a daily exercise routine, but it has to do with multiple physical limitations. It also whacks me in the head with brain fog for a long time afterward. So I have to be careful what I do, when I do it, and how I do it.

BUT… I still really want to form a longterm habit of doing some sort of activity for 20 minutes every day. And this year, I WILL be successful. Because, after all, it’s science, and I get a kick out of hacking my weird brain into doing what I want it to.

The fascinating thing is that when life gets hectic, when you get distracted, or when a crisis hits, you will fall back on both GOOD and BAD habits. And that makes sense when you really think about it.

Most of the time, no matter how crazy life gets, you’re likely to brush your teeth at the end of the day, right? (And, yes, I know that for neurodivergent folks even long-time habits can fail to kick in if our dopamine levels aren’t, well, level. But please allow me to speak in generalities to clarify this point for the vast majority of humans.)

But again, it’s that reward system that can turn your habits into long-term routines.

One of the reward hacks I implemented in 2024 was a simple glass jar and a bag of fake gems. I kid you not. Every single day I get this little hit of dopamine when I realize how many gems I can add to the jar. For every hour of the day that I am diligently working on something useful, I get a gem.

It could be anything really: learning a new skill, exercising, self-care, cleaning house, working on a client project, etc. When I’ve completely filled the jar to the brim, I give myself whatever reward I’d like. It changes every time. It could be buying a new shirt, giving myself a day off to just paint or sculpt, buying something cool for my office, or whatever feels like a dopamine-inducer at the time.

It really doesn’t take much for me to feel a rush of dopamine. So I will likely think of something like that to use as a reward for exercising for 20 minutes. If I go for a walk, I will likely pair it with listening to my favorite music or a fantastic podcast on a subject I’m passionate about.

Or if I choose to focus on doing yoga or some ballet moves, I’ll watch TV or listen to music. But I’m still formulating my plans on how to turn exercise into a serious habit. And I’m quite serious about making this happen. So much so, I just chose my word of the year for 2025: MOVE.

Let’s break down the three parts of a habit and dive a little deeper:

The repetition

Consistency is, of course, key to this whole habit-formation process. Can’t really get away from that. But you CAN remove as many barriers and distractions as possible in order to ensure that the repeating behavior continues uninterrupted.

For example, I had been wanting to kickstart my day by taking my morning medications the moment I wake up. One of my barriers to forming this habit was forgetting to do it after I walked into the living room and became distracted by my adorable miniature schnauzer pestering me for attention.

So my simple fixes were to set a reminder to go off on my Echo device telling me to take my medications as well putting a glass of water on my bedside table the night before so everything was ready and within arm’s reach the moment I woke up.

The stable behavior

If possible you can insert your new habit into a routine you are already doing every day. The habits you already perform on autopilot will act as a trigger for your new habit so you’re more likely to remember to do it.

The reward

According to Dr. Wood: “it’s that immediacy [of the reward] that matters. There’s also a neural process that happens—when you are rewarded, your brain releases dopamine, which is a neurochemical, that actually binds together the context that you’re in and the response that you gave in order to get that reward. That’s one of the reasons why rewards are so important and so useful for forming habits.”

In a sense, what you’re trying to do is get your brain to remember and want the reward you’ll get after you’ve completed the desired habit/behavior.

Author and Motivational Speaker Mel Robbins shared an excellent example on her podcast recently (The Mel Robbins Podcast, Build Amazing Habits, Episode 221, Oct 11, 2024). The habit she wanted to form was going to an exercise class very early in the morning. She paired that repetitive activity with the reward of a breakfast burrito that she’d eat after class at nearby coffeeshop.

Here’s how Robbins’ tells it:

“The next morning, my alarm goes off at 5 a.m. What do you think was the first thing that popped into my mind?

“The breakfast burrito. This is why the science of habits matters. When you have a reward tied to the new behavior, your mind, the second that the trigger hits, and for me the trigger for the new behavior of exercising at 5.30 in the morning, was the alarm going off and seeing my exercise clothes laid out on the floor.

“When you have a good reward, your mind skips over the behavior and focuses on the reward. This is such powerful science that when I would be walking to that exercise class, you know what I was thinking about? The burrito.”

How long will it really take to form a new habit?

You may have heard that it takes twenty-one days to form a new habit. Newer data points to a longer timeframe.

According to Dr. Wood’s research, usually it takes two to three months to really make it stick. At that point it will likely be so automated that you won’t even have to think about it.

So now the real question is: what new resolutions do you plan to stick to in 2025? Here’s wishing you success, no matter what you choose!

____________________
Want to dive deeper into this topic? Check out Dr. Wood’s preeminent book on this subject:

Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick