Creating HABITS for the long haul.
Let’s start with a brief recap of what we’ve covered so far:
→ Actions are one-off tasks we want the audience to complete by a specific date.
→ Routines are recurring tasks that require the audience to exert time, energy, and effort to complete.
→ Some, but not all, routines can become habits.
Habits are behaviors we complete automatically with little to no conscious thought when activated by a cue. The cue can be any number of things, from a sound or visual notification, the completion of a previous task, the time of day, or the start of a new task.
This diagram from Gardner et al.’s paper “What is habit and how can it be used to change real-world behaviour? Narrowing the theory-reality gap.” demonstrates how a cue triggers an automatic (or habit impulse) response and leads to the completion of a habitual behavior.
To make all our lives simpler, we will refer to this entire process as a “habit” from here on out. However, I recommend reading the complete paper by Gardner et al. to get into the nuance of habits.
Here are three examples of desired habits I have seen from Making Moves course participants applied to the habit diagram: picking up dog poop, eating less meat, and bringing reusable bags to the grocery store.
The goal of practicing these behaviors consistently as routines is for them to become so ingrained in our brains as “muscle memory” that everything happens automatically and immediately once we encounter the cue.
“A habit feels uncomfortable when we don’t do it, exactly the opposite is true of routines.” – Nir Eyal.
How to spot habits in your project.
Here are indications that you have a habit (not a rabbit or a hobbit) in your project.
You want the audience to modify an existing habit to make it more sustainable. This could be a case where the existing behavior isn’t entirely bad and, with a few tweaks, could be completed in a more sustainable way.
For example, if we want fishers to adopt sustainable fishing practices, we don’t need the audience to learn an entirely new livelihood or practice. They can still complete the basics of their habit: their morning ritual, grabbing their fishing gear, getting into the boat, going out to sea, coming back at a certain time, and so on.
However, they will need to revise some of their associations with the cue of “going fishing,” including fishing outside of restricted zones and only using approved legal gear.
You want the desired behavior to replace an existing habit. We all possess some “bad” habits that occur when a cue triggers a response that isn’t in our best interest, like looking at our phones before going to bed.
Instead of modifying the existing habit by locking social media channels or eliminating the habit of looking at anything before bed (as if!), we might seek to replace it with an alternate behavior of reading a book or journaling.
The restaurant behavior journey aims to achieve a similar goal by introducing an alternate habit of composting food scraps and organic matter to replace the existing habit of throwing everything into the landfill bin. Since this new habit requires learning what to compost and how to manage a compost stream, the behavior starts as a routine before progressing into a habit.
The additional desired habit of restaurant managers monitoring compost activity represents the third indication that you have a habit in your behavior journey, which we get to next.
You want to introduce your audience to an entirely new habit. This may be a scenario where you are introducing a new behavior to everyone, like back in the day when scooping the poop and reusable grocery bags wasn’t a thing.
However, it can also include introducing a new habit to an audience segment that has not yet started the journey of change, even though others have.
In the member engagement behavior journey, we are introducing a new habit of becoming fully engaged in the organization’s work. The aim is to have every communication the organization sends – emails, registration links, social media posts – cue an automatic response from the member to read, click, sign, join, and share.
As you might imagine, achieving this level of fandom and engagement from subscribers and followers is not easy. Therefore, it’s best to set realistic goals for what percentage of the audience will become this engaged, what percent may continue treating the task as a routine, and how you can continue to close the gap between the two.
These three scenarios are listed in order of increasing difficulty.
It is less challenging to ask the audience to modify their habit slightly than it is to introduce an alternative or a new habit.
Please note that I said “less challenging” but not easier or faster, which is contingent on the audience, the desired habit, and the resources available to support the audience.
BUT, knowing that some options are less challenging than others presents an opportunity to consider what we’re asking audiences to do and if there could be a less challenging pathway to change.
Common barriers to making habits stick.
The top three challenges audience members face with turning routines into habits are:
→ It’s hard to rewire our responses. “But this is what I always do.”
It’s not easy to change a response to a cue, undoing a pattern we currently do on automatic. Even though habit modifications and alternatives may be “less challenging,” they still ask the audience to disrupt, stop, or reject their instinct to do what they have always done.
→ Current habits may continue to tempt us. “I liked what I was doing before.”
All current habits exist for a reason – we enjoy them, are comfortable with them, and they often make our lives easier. This means we can be tempted to go back to old habits as we are learning to adopt new ones.
→ It can become a drag to keep going. “Ugh, will there ever be a day when I don’t have to do this???”
In the previous post, we talked about using reminders, support, and motivation to help audiences be consistent with practicing routines. However, the struggle of repeating a new or modified behavior doesn’t magically go away once it becomes a habit. It can continue to be annoying and tedious to do (I’m looking at you, dental floss!)
What audiences need from us to keep going for the long haul.
Our job is to encourage audience members to stay consistent with new habits until they become second nature and help them resist the temptation to return to old habits.
Audiences need to receive these three elements to keep on keepin’ on.
Motivation and Enjoyment.
“[E]ven for habitual behaviours, long-term maintenance will likely require a base level of positive motivation towards the habitual behaviour.” (Gardner et al., 2024)
We would love to believe that our work is done once the audience has successfully adopted a sustainable habit. But as we learned in the barriers section above, habits aren’t guaranteed to last forever.
Our job is to find creative ways to sustain the audience’s motivation to avoid regression.
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Regularly update your outreach materials to keep them fresh, new, and engaging. Receiving new messages about the benefits of maintaining a habit reminds audience members why they initially made the change, which helps them feel a renewed sense of commitment to continuing their practice.
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Make it fun. Finding the fun in doing a habit day after day can increase the enjoyment factor. This is an opportunity to get creative and even a little silly to help habits stick.
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Provide recognition for their achievements. The long haul can feel looooooooong. But if we intentionally divide “forever” into milestones, we can celebrate and recognize the audience’s achievements, which provides a motivational boost. You can use the “up the ante” portion of the Feedback Loops blog for ideas on using milestones, badges, and contests.
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Brush off the setbacks. “Habit-disruption interventions should frame lapses as temporary, permissible setbacks, not irreversible failures.” (Gardner et al., 2024)
Cues and positive associations to help trigger the desired behavior.
Automatic habits are an instinctive response to a specific cue, which we learn over time and repetition. To build a new habit or disrupt an existing one, we can teach or provide new cues and new associations with those cues to elicit the desired response.
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Create fun, easy-to-remember phrases audience members can use to establish new cue-response associations, like “lefty loosey, righty tighty.” This post on fluency shortcuts can help get you started.
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Offer new sound or visual cues to prompt a new habit. This technique has been used to help people shorten their shower times to conserve water by providing a waterproof timer they can use in the shower or recommending specific songs to play that keep shower times to five minutes.
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Provide the audience with tips and techniques for disrupting their current cue responses. This is easier said than done since it requires conscientiousness and willpower to disrupt your own impulse, but it doesn’t hurt to equip your audience with mantras or mind tricks that work.
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Use friction to make undesirable habits challenging to continue. Think of the many apps that remind us how much time we’ve spent on social media or that automatically block us from looking at certain apps during specific times of the day. These tools introduce friction to reduce the availability and accessibility of certain habits.
The UN launched the “Pause Before You Share” campaign during the COVID-19 pandemic to encourage social media users to consider the credibility of the information they read before sharing it with others on the channel. Asking people to pause before they act helps people switch from impulsive to more thoughtful reactions (i.e., switching from System 1 thinking to System 2 thinking).
A social support network.
Habits can begin to feel like a slog, partly because it feels like a lonely endeavor. Unfortunately, when we feel like the only ones “suffering” through the habit-creation process, we get more tempted to give up and return to our old ways.
Creating and supporting a social network helps audience members feel less alone.
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Feature real-life examples of audience members adopting new habits in outreach materials and have them provide personal tips and techniques for staying consistent with their practice.
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Create a community group, chat, or forum where audience members can share their journey, ask questions, vent, and exchange resources.
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Bring audience members together (if realistic to do) to co-create a set of best practices, serve as mentors to those who are just starting their journeys of change, and continue building their capacity.
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Share updates on the number of people adopting the new habit and the collective positive impact it’s having on the planet.
Even though the habit stage is often the final step in our behavior journeys, audience members who reach this stage shouldn’t fall out of our target audience segmentation.
We want audiences to practice sustainable habits forever, so we must continually (and forever) nurture their involvement and keep them engaged. Be sure to plan your outreach efforts and budgets accordingly.
That’s a wrap!
We have covered all three types of behaviors in the Behavior Change Trio: Actions, Routines, and Habits.
The behavior journeys you’re designing may not contain all three behavior types, and that’s okay.
Not every journey ends in a habit. Some time-bound journeys mainly involve actions with a few hopeful routines sprinkled in for good measure.
You may not correctly distinguish routines from habits every time, and that’s also okay.
The intention is to understand how these different behaviors look and feel to our audience so we can provide the support, tools, and motivation they need most and set realistic expectations for what we can achieve.
→ Catch up on all the Behavior Trio posts here.
Do you want to create a detailed behavior journey for your project, like the ones shown above? Then join the Making Moves course! We start designing journeys in lesson 1 and refine them throughout the 8-week course, so you walk away with a clear, structured plan for motivating audiences to protect the planet.