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Understanding Habit Formation
Practicing a behavior for 21 days without breaks helps us to form a habit. This is a scientifically proven theory. Habits can be formed without a person intending to do so. Habits can be formed consciously, subconsciously or through compulsion.
When we want to perform well in school, we make it a habit to study daily. Likewise, we sometimes take up smoking or drinking and it becomes a habit. Habits can be good or bad, hence it is crucial to be aware of what we practice.
Good vs Bad Habits
We all must have studied this when we were young. Waking up early, brushing teeth, bathing, praying, eating healthy, doing our work, exercising and going to bed on time are some good habits. While waking up late, being unhygienic, being disrespectful, binging on food, being late to bed are some bad habits to list out.
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Good habits serve our life. It makes us a better person internally and externally. Good habits attract people, improving our social circle. Bad habits ruin our life, spoil our personality and will keep people away from us.
Good or bad habits, according to psychology we can unlearn habits if we don’t practice for long. For instance, for someone who has been waking up early for years together, it will be difficult to wake up early. A person who has been waking up early for a few days is vulnerable to unlearning this habit. Hence any habit is about practicing.
What is Burnout?
After every day our body feels tired and indicates to us that it needs rest. This rest helps our body to regain energy and be ready for the next day. If we fail to present our body with rest it becomes exhausted and weak. We feel uneasy, unwilling to do any work, losing our enthusiasm. This state of the body is called burnout. When mental exhaustion affects our physical well being or vice versa it is called burnout.
Burnout causes stress, anxiety, depression, body pain, weak immune system and fatigue reducing our overall productivity.
How can habit formation lead to Burnout
Forming a habit is a healthy lifestyle, but when it exceeds its limit, it turns unhealthy. While practicing healthy habits we would initially feel healthy, but when we fail not to practice it for one day, we feel bad about ourselves. This bad feeling demotivates us, leading to insecurity.
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We feel the pressure to make something a habit by making drastic changes in our life which our body will not accept. And when our body disapproves of our changes, we want to give up this leads to burnout.
This is very true when we lack the right motivation to start the habit building and start out of compulsion or external pressures.
Let us understand better with an example. Our aim is to wake up early because someone said that this improves productivity. We start on day one by setting an alarm at the time we want to wake up, let us keep it at 5am.The alarm rings at 5am and we wake up. We feel energized, get a lot of tasks done and try to keep the energy up till late night.
The next day we want to wake up but we feel tired, because the previous day was good, but did not motivate us as much as it should have because the whole habit forming exercise was started to follow someone else. But still, we ignore the tiredness and would insist on waking up early. This cycle continues for a while, unintentionally draining our energy.
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This leads to burnout. And when we can’t wake up by the desired time, we will lose the motivation leading to emotional burnout along with physical fatigue.
Avoiding burnout while forming habits
While trying to form a habit it is crucial to have sustainable expectations. Our goals must be realistic and achievable in the long run. If not, we won’t be able to form any habits and constantly breaking the cycle of habit formation affects our self-esteem.
Adapting a new habit should be done in small increments rather than over-reaching.
Let us take the same example. If we usually wake up by 10am and desire to wake up by 5am we need to take small steps. Trying to jump from step one to step five is harmful. We need to start to break down the time, and to make reliable plans. So here, we must not set an alarm for 5am, instead we need to start from 9am, then onto 8am to 7am gradually reducing till 5am. This will give our body enough time to understand and adapt to the changes. It also lets us learn to spend time more effectively.
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Baby steps might not be much but are significant for everything. If we make mistakes while taking the baby steps we might fail, but it is easy to retract and rebound. Whenever we want to make changes, drastic measures will pass our body through a tremendous wave of shock affecting its whole system.
Conclusion
Learning or unlearning a habit must be taken slow and there must be realistic and measurable changes. Setting unrealistic changes will not let us accomplish them, corrupting our whole system. Unrealistic changes take a lot of time to get habituated and will impact our routine.
Whenever we fail to follow our new routine, we must not feel disappointed or defeated. We must understand that forming a routine involves transforming practices that you have been doing since childhood. Our body takes time to adopt changes and we must give it that time to make sure it is happy and can perform to its fullest. The more we pressure and get disappointed in our body the more it gets stressed and depressed.
Learn to live in the movement and to take things slow which will earn you greater results.
