Forming Healthy Habits

Not quite as easy as it should be

When I started this Substack, I imagined it to be incredibly politically oriented, with a smattering of other things. So, naturally, my first post will be more in the range of behavior and psychology.

Go figure.

To provide a little bit more of an introduction, I’m currently in my first year of a School Psychology graduate degree program. In a class on Behaviorism, I was assigned to listen to an especially interesting podcast on habit formation (I’ll link the podcast here). For those of you who don’t have 50 minutes on your hands, the podcast was largely centered around how we form habits, good and bad. In a nutshell, we form habits not necessarily because they’re enjoyable, but because they’re easy for us, and they’re what we’ve taught ourselves to do over and over again throughout the course of our lives.

In my own life, for example, I don’t nearly exercise as much as I should. I don’t eat as many fruits and vegetables as I should, either. However, if I get any less than 7 and a half hours of sleep, something must be seriously wrong with me.

The funny thing is, I don’t necessarily try to get 8 hours of sleep. I’m not even an early bird by any means (and anyone who knows me well can testify to that). However, right around 8 hours before I have to wake up, my body almost feels compelled to jump into bed and take a trip to dreamland. It’s just the way that I’ve lived all my life, and therefore it’s the easiest, most natural way to do things.

Where this gets a bit more interesting is the mechanisms that explain how we’ve created these habits. Sure, our habits are what we’ve learned to do repeatedly, year after year, but why do we make these particular choices? Trying not to plagiarize the podcast, we end up making choices that are “easier”, or more natural, to us while avoiding the ones that are more difficult. Here, it’s important to notice that “easy” doesn’t necessarily meant what it usually does. When it comes to habits, what’s “easy” is what we are most used to doing. For a long distance runner, it’s “easiest” to go for a run each morning (or whenever they normally choose to run). The run is built into their schedule, they’ve created time for sleep, breakfast, and work around the time they spend running, and their body and brain is used to receiving that runner’s high endorphin boost in the morning. If they stop running, that leaves a massive hole in their morning, and could completely throw off their schedule for the day. Not to mention the lack of runner’s high, and the loss of physical and mental health benefits from exercising. While going for a run is certainly not the easiest thing to do in the traditional sense, it’s the path of least resistance for a long distance runner.

What’s especially interesting is that psychologists know this, and businesses have caught on as well. When you go to a buffet, you’re incredibly likely to grab the first food you see, as well as the food that’s closest to your line of sight. Buffets know this, and will often put cheaper foods like salads right up front, so that you can fill up on lettuce before getting to the prime rib. Drive thrus were, in part, created to bolster the habit of relying on speedy, easily accessible junk food rather than taking the time to cook healthier foods. Grocery stores aren’t any different. They know that you’re most likely to look for staple foods, like eggs, bread, dairy, and meat, so they tuck these foods into the back of the store. As you traverse the aisles on your journey to the eggs, you’re more likely to see something you forgot you wanted and make an impulse purchase. You’ll have to walk a whole lot further to gather the ingredients to make a pizza yourself than to meander over to the frozen food section and pick out a frozen pie. Of course, this is also why grocery stores also put other impulse items like candy, drinks, and mints up by the registers, a focal point that everyone has to pass through (and often wait in line at) before they leave the store. The longer you’re waiting in line, the more likely you’ll be tempted by that last Hershey bar.

Luckily, we can learn to fight back against these less savory tactics. While a simple knowledge of them will help in the grocery store (I say this as I bought a tube of Lays Stax just earlier today because I saw them on sale), we can use similar methods to make certain wanted decisions easier and unwanted decisions harder. Do you have a sweet tooth? Keep your decadent snacks in a box away from the rest of your food, so that you don’t see them as often. Hope to run, but can’t find the time? Sleep in your workout clothes so you have one less step in the morning. Want to find the time to read again? Keep your book on the bedside table, and your phone charger across the room. Are any of these solutions absolutely perfect? Of course not. However, if these tactics didn’t make businesses more money than they would otherwise, you can very much bet that they would not be using them. Two can play at that game, and when trying to form a habit, truly every bit counts.

(Don’t pay attention to this lovely chocolate cake, I’m just using it so that people access their habits of looking at tasty treats and click on my Substack post. Thanks Arise Cake Creations

While recognition of the problem is certainly helpful, it’s no secret that American food, in general, is significantly unhealthier than its counterparts in the rest of the world. Not to mention, of course, that things like gym memberships can be egregiously expensive and incredibly difficult to cancel. Even if we strive to make mentally and physically healthy choices, there’s a fair amount of barriers, financial and systemic, to jump over.

For example, corn is the most subsidized crop by the United States government. This, in itself, doesn’t seem like a bad thing. Corn, after all, is used for biofuels and animal feed (40% and 36% of crop yields, respectively). Most of the rest is exported, and a tiny percentage of that is used for human consumption. Out of what’s consumed, only a small amount is the cobs or cans of corn that you’ll find in a supermarket. The majority of corn production can be found up by the registers, hidden in the candy and soda as high fructose corn syrup.

It’s hard to make good habitual decisions when we’re not even using a majority of corn production to make corn. With the powers that be, making healthy choices is so much harder in the United States than in more well-regulated countries around the world. When I was living in Spain, I learned that in the European Union, foods sold at grocery stores are rated from A to F, from healthiest to unhealthiest. While the system sometimes seems to be comparing apples to oranges (both A’s, by the way), and is far from perfect, it was a good overall marker to keep track of roughly how healthy my grocery haul was for that week.

Of course, other changes to our current system would involve dismantling the lobbying that provides such massive subsidies to an agricultural system that doesn’t always have our best interests in mind (Oh, hey, I guess we found our way back to politics after all). At the very least, one could consider regulating the distribution of subsidies, promoting distribution to farms that prioritize the production of whole foods. An increased production and supply of whole foods would have the added benefit of reducing the cost of those fruits and vegetables, removing another barrier of creating and maintaining healthy habits.

All in all, it’s important to notice that creating and maintaining healthy habits on a societal scale requires a two-pronged approach. At the individual level, we have a lot of options and strategies towards ensuring that the healthier choice is often the easier choice. We can stow away the cookies, sleep in our workout clothes, or take a different route home to avoid cravings for that McDonald’s Dr. Pepper we pass by every day. However, these choices are even more difficult when considering the economic and societal incentives to purchase unhealthy foods and prioritize convenience over quality. While personal strategies can go a long way, societal changes are just as necessary, even if they’re exponentially more difficult to achieve. At the very least, a simple knowledge of the problem provides a necessary first step.