How To Track Your Habits
Learn more about why and how to track your habits.
Habits are automatic behaviors that don’t require conscious control. In other words, habits are the things you do without even thinking about it. Checking your phone, locking your doors, or brushing your teeth before bed are all examples of common habits. Some of our habits are beneficial to our health, like having breakfast in the morning or going for an evening walk. Other habits are not so good for us, like smoking cigarettes or binge eating.
Because habits are automatic and don’t require awareness or intention, we can often behave in ways that are not in line with our long-term goals or fail to behave in ways that will facilitate our goals. But, as the popular saying goes, “You don’t rise to the level of your expectations but fall to the level of your training.”
Creating positive habits and breaking bad habits can be extremely challenging and in some cases may take a long time, but is certainly worth the effort. When a behavior becomes a habit, it becomes easy to perform even when your motivation wanes. Keeping a daily record of the behaviors we want to implement or change over time can help facilitate successful, long-term changes.
Habit tracking is basically just recording the behavior you’re trying to change. For example, let’s say you want to start a habit of doing breathing exercises first thing in the morning every day. Using a habit tracker, you would make a note of every time you got out of bed and did your breathing exercises. Similarly, if you wanted to stop drinking sodas, you would note every day you successfully abstained from it. Over time, you would be able to get a sense of how consistently you’re achieving your goal and what factors might be at play on days when you fail.
For many people, habit tracking is highly effective. Many habit-tracking apps and journals have glowing reviews from individuals who have revolutionized their lives by tracking their habits. Science also supports the efficacy of habit tracking and suggests that by monitoring your behavior, you enhance your self-control capacity and thus improve your ability to change target behaviors in the desired manner (Quinn et al., 2010).
Though habit tracking can be a great way to help you change your behavior in a meaningful way, research has shown that there is a risk of becoming dependent on the tracker to sustain the behavior (Renfree et al., 2016; Stawarz et al., 2015). Typically, habits form by cue association, which means that a particular context or aspect of your environment will trigger the behavior. For example, if you usually brush your teeth and then wash your face, brushing your teeth might become the cue that signals that your next action should be washing your face.
So while habit trackers are a good way to be sure you consistently perform some behavior, it is possible that you could end up relying on the reminders they provide to trigger the action. You can avoid this, however, by being sure to associate your new habit with a behavior you already do regularly.
“Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.”
―
Here are a few tips that might help you as you build your new habits:
1. Start with small habits that you can complete in 2 minutes or less that you can stick to even on hard days. The streaks of success you’ll have in your new small habits will help give you the momentum you need to work on the bigger ones.
2. Don’t miss two days in a row. When you miss a day, give yourself a little grace and self-compassion, but get back to it asap. Every day you miss diminishes your progress a bit more.
3. If you’re working towards a goal, break it down into smaller steps. For example, if your goal is to get fit, the first step might be doing 10 minutes of yoga daily.
4. Keep your habit tracker available at all times. Using an app on your phone or computer is a good option so you never have to try to remember to record your habits later.
5. Celebrate your successes. Even when your habits are small and don’t feel particularly noteworthy, it’s important to recognize your progress as it’s happening.
6. Keep a journal of how accomplishing the tasks you’ve set for yourself feels. Noting that you had more energy when you exercised in the morning or that your mood was better after you meditated is a great way to encourage yourself to keep at it when your motivation wanes.
Habit tracking is a phenomenal way to improve your health and well-being and to gain a deeper understanding of yourself. By measuring how consistently we perform a desired action or abstain from a harmful one, we can get an accurate picture of how successful we are in establishing a habit, how our developing habit is affecting our physical and psychological health, and what factors thwart or facilitate our capacity to consistently stick to our goal. There are numerous options for tracking habits. Some are simple, like making a mark in a calendar indicating success, and some are more involved, like creating a habit tracking journal or using a habit tracking app. The best method is whatever method works best for you. Remember, a behavior only becomes a habit after plenty of repetition so it’s important to stick with it.
● Quinn, J. M., Pascoe, A., Wood, W., & Neal, D. T. (2010). Can’t control yourself? Monitor those bad habits. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36(4), 499-511.
● Renfree, I., Harrison, D., Marshall, P., Stawarz, K., & Cox, A. (2016). Don’t kick the habit: The role of dependency in habit formation apps. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI conference extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems (pp. 2932-2939).
● Stawarz, K., Cox, A. L., & Blandford, A. (2015). Beyond self-tracking and reminders: designing smartphone apps that support habit formation. In Proceedings of the 33rd annual ACM conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 2653-2662).
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