TM4T - Basics: Habits 2 - The Mysterious Case of the Staff-room Biscuit

Step 1: First, catch your habit.

At last. The bell rings and the classroom empties. Next lesson is PPA time and I have a lot to do. Soon I am sitting at my desk, alone in the room, with a cup of coffee, a chocolate biscuit and a pile of books to mark. I glance at the clock, and...

… hold on - what's going on here? It is only 37 minutes until the next lesson starts, but... in our school lessons are 50 minutes long. Someone has stolen 25% of my 'free' time! Where have my missing 13 minutes gone to??

Well, I did pop over to the staff-room to grab a cup of coffee before I started marking, and I admit that I did have a little chat and munch a chocolate biscuit while I was there, waiting for the kettle to boil. I do that quite a lot I guess - chocolate biscuits, that is; I may even have put on the odd pound or two in weight, though I think my wife's comments the other day were a little unfair...

I finally decided, last week, to cut out the chocolate biscuits, but this week just about every morning break has involved a chocolate nibble in the staffroom and a chat with the guys from Biology. The chocolate feels good... but then it feels bad, you know? I have decided that, starting tomorrow, I will quit chocolate for a while. I know I tried last week, but tomorrow will be different.

Of course it will. Not.

So, what's going on here? It's a habit loop, obviously, but we need to be clear exactly what components are involved.

A habit is just a fixed routine that our brain automatically follows: “When I encounter cue, I will do behaviour in order to get reward”. Simple, but deeply embedded. We need to identify all three elements. This isn't easy, and it isn't obvious, because we need precise answers. If you want to tackle a habit, you need to really understand it, and tease its components apart..

The behaviour is usually easiest: I go to the staff-room, grab a chocolate biscuit, make a cup of coffee, and chat to anyone who's nearby, eating another choccy (or two) while doing so.

What about the cue? Is it the bell? Maybe the magic words 'PPA' or 'break' on my time-table; or release from the stress of classroom contact, or a drop in blood sugar, or a simple caffeine craving or hunger?

And what about the reward? The biscuit itself? Chocolate? Escape from children or a simple change of scenery from Room 6? A temporary distraction from AFL? Social contact with adults? Or just an energy boost from the rise in blood sugar?

Oooh, I hate the answer to these questions, which is, alas: there isn't any one correct answer. We are all different, and our habits are different; one man's cue is another man's reward, and to work out what is really going on, you need to unleash your inner scientist, and do a controlled experiment.

Second, meddle with your rewards.

We start with rewards because they are where the power lies - they satisfy cravings of which we are rarely aware... Or rather, we are rarely aware of them until they are not being met.

This means that we may be able to identify the reward component quite easily - smokers recognise the physical sensation of 'gasping for a fag' and in my situation, some teachers might be physically aware of 'dying for a coffee' or 'needing some chocolate'. However, lots of people, including me, just feel a generalised yearning towards the staff-room, where lies the chocolate, the coffee, and the company.

So: In order to identify which cues - which cravings - are fuelling my choco-habits, I need to don a white-coat and clipboard (metaphorically) and experiment a little.

When I feel the urge to head towards my staffroom choccy, I need to do something different, which gives a modified, or partial reward. Maybe I go and chat to the lab technicians, and scrounge a cup of tea in the tech-room. Next day maybe I eat an energy bar sitting at my desk. Tomorrow I might have a chocolate biscuit and a glass of water, and next day an apple and a caffeine table in the staffroom. Maybe I go to the staff-room and chat, with no coffee or chocolate biscuit. You get my drift: the exact alternative isn't important; what is important is a controlled testing of hypotheses to identify what it really is that is feeding your habit.

Remember that I'm not just trying new things here; heck, I'm a scientist. I therefore need to record my findings and test my results.

First, I use a technique long-loved by behavioural scientists: each time I test a reward, straight afterwards I randomly note down the first three things which occur. These might be marks-out-of-ten, feelings, dissatisfactions, or just random ideas. Just three, any three, each one-or-two words, to act as memory triggers when I start to look for patterns.

Secondly, I also jot down the time. Then, 12 minutes later, I record how strong (on a score of 1-5) are my cravings for the dreaded another-chocolate-biscuit. This scoring is the key to identifying what reward is really involved. If I still desperately want to go the staff-room for a chocolate biscuit 12 minutes after eating a high-energy breakfast bar, I can be pretty sure that blood-sugar is not the key reward; on the other hand, if 12 minutes after chatting to the lab technicians I don't want to head for the staff-room and nibble, then I am close to understanding what is really driving my habit.

If you're trying to tackle a habit, step two is to analyse data that you've collected, to precisely identify the underlying reward involved in the behaviour. Reward? Or 'rewards' of course. We've chosen a deliberately complicated example here: it includes at least two potentially addictive substances to consider: sugar and caffeine, as well as the habit itself. Your scoring (1-5) therefore needs to take into account the base-level of need, in other words '1' represents how much I want a chocolate biscuit all the time.

In my case, it should be relatively easy (over a week or two) to filter out whether it's the calories, just the caffeine, someone to talk-to, or a change of scene, which makes the staff-room chocolate trip so irresistible.

Third, doodle with cues

Cues are complicated beasts. David Attenbrough should do a programme about them.

Behaviours can be seen, rewards can usually be felt, but cues can be really difficult to determine. This is because habits can be triggered in a huge variety of ways. Having said that, the cues themselves are frequently very simple things, fiendishly well-concealed.

In the majority of cases, cues to everyday habits can be found by looking at patterns under five key headings, with acronym TOPPLE:

Time of day

Other People

Pattern of events

Location

Emotion

If you're trying to tackle a habit, step 3 is to ask yourself five key questions every time you become aware of the cue - in other words every time you feel the urge to carry out your behaviour (of course at this exact time, the cue has already kicked in and the habit loop is being executed).

The questions are:

T: What is the time?

OP: What other people have I had (or am I having) contact with?

P: What has just happened? What else is happening now?

L: Where am I?

E: How am I feeling right now?

[ Now, everyone is different, so I know this doesn't help you much, but I guess you may be curious. My reward-meddling suggested that the reward for my habit was adult company, not sugar or caffeine; my cue doodling suggested that it was triggered by an exodus of students and an empty classroom ]

Step 4: Assess Impact and effort.

Now, if you want to do this step first, that's fine: this step involves figuring out how harmful the habit really is and how much effort it is worth investing in its correction.

Going back to the first paragraph: I lost 13 minutes of my free period (this is partly because the staff-room is a 3 minute walk from my teaching room). This habit therefore occupies virtually all of my morning break every single day, as well as 13 minutes of each PPA lesson, as well as 7 minutes of my lunch break (I have to go the staff-room anyway), and also 13 minutes of my time immediately after school. A total of 46 minutes.

Now, this is a personal thing. I like socialising in my free time, and I think it is important; I don't want to stop it, just to cut it down and control it. So, in my personal case, I've decided that I want to cut this in half, so this habit is unwanted for 23 minutes a day. That isn't so much, until you do the maths. 190 teaching days each year x 23 minutes, that's... holy macaroon.. that's 72 HOURS - the equivalent of two weeks work (or two weeks holiday depending on how you look at it). This needs fixing.

Fifth and final step: don't just sit there, DO something.

When you’ve sussed out your habit loop – when you've identified the reward that your habit generates and the cue triggering it, as well as the behaviour itself, then you can consider changing it. You can change to a better routine by planning for the cue, and choosing a better behaviour that delivers the reward you are craving.

Remember, habits don't just happen. They represent a choice that we made deliberately at some stage in our lives. We have probably forgotten when and why we made that choice, but we continue to follow the habit without thinking, day after day. Well, today is the day to start thinking again, to start making choices again.

Simply (don't you dread that word) replace your behaviour with a better one. You may need some help in the early stages. 'Help' in this context means two things. First of all, you may need some help to identify your 'cue' depending on what it is; for example post-it notes to trap location cues, alarm-clocks to trap time cues and so on.

Secondly, you may need help with your willpower. Obviously, this needs to come mainly from within, but by sharing your intentions with those close to you, you can gain support and motivation to make your change happen.

The important thing is to repeat, repeat repeat: practice your new habit repeatedly over a period of several weeks - generate cues artificially if necessary, but make sure that you have enough opportunity to make your new behaviour automatic.