Why You Should Think of New Habits As Skills

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I do a lot of things on a regular basis that people might classify as “good habits.” I go for a walk every morning. I hit the gym nearly every day. I prep my meals on the weekends so I always have something healthy to eat for lunch. But I didn’t arrive at these behaviors solely through habit stacking or some other clever hack. Because the truth is, most “habits” are really skills that take work and time to develop—not simple set-it-and-forget-it hacks.
Most “habits” aren’t that simple

Psychologists define “habits” as things we do automatically in a specific situation. “For example, the act of hair twirling may eventually occur without the individual’s conscious awareness,” reads the definition from the American Psychological Association.

But when we talk about building a habit, we usually mean something that we do on a regular basis. Maybe it happens automatically—that may be the goal—but it isn’t a reflexive reaction to our environment. For example, people commonly say they want to build “habits” like:
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Going to the gym

Eating more vegetables

Reading books

Flossing teeth

Getting to bed on time

None of these are simple, reflexive, or unconscious behaviors. A few are relatively simple—you could probably use classic habit hacks like stacking to make sure you floss after you brush. But most habits take a lot more work to develop.
What we really want is behavior change

Psychologists have a different term for things like eating healthy, getting more sleep, and reading a book instead of doomscrolling social media. They call it "behavior change," and there are countless studies and theoretical models exploring how people actually end up changing their behaviors.

What they’ve found is that adopting a new behavior (what we’ve been calling a “habit”) requires us to invest time and effort, and we go through several mindset shifts as we evolve from a person who doesn’t do the thing, to a person who does the thing all the time. See if you can spot yourself in one of these:

Precontemplation: You are not yet interested in doing the thing (let’s say: going to the gym).

Contemplation: You’re thinking about starting to do the thing on a regular basis. You might have started reading articles about what it would be like to visit a gym for the first time.

Preparation: You’re taking steps toward doing the thing. This is where you visit your neighborhood gym for a tour, or buy a pair of running shoes. Maybe you try a workout or two, but you’re not committed yet.

Action: You’re doing the thing. Note that this is not the first stage, nor the last. At this point, you still have a lot of questions, you may feel uncomfortable in your new routine, and if something goes wrong, you may give up.

Maintenance: This is you once you’ve finally built the “habit.” Like maintaining a car or a relationship, keeping up a habit takes work. Things will turn up that disrupt the habit; you might take a vacation, or get injured, or get discouraged in your progress. While you’re in this stage, you need to learn to anticipate and deal with those potential problems in order for the behavior change to stick.

It takes work, time, and mindset changes to move from each stage to the next. And the process isn’t always linear: Maybe you move to a new city and miss a few weeks’ worth of workouts, and then you have to find a new gym. That knocks you back a few steps on the chart, but it doesn’t have to push you off of it altogether.
Every “habit” has its own learning process

A lot goes into even the behaviors that seem straightforward. For example, if you want to eat more fruit, you could set out a fruit bowl. But that’s not the beginning or the end of it. You need to know what fruits you like. You need to buy them regularly. You need to know how to shop for them, avoiding the berries that are about to turn moldy and the bananas that are so underripe they’ll still be green for days. (It would also help to know that the berries will last longer if you store them in the fridge, and that you can buy green and yellow bananas in the same shopping trip so you have a week’s worth of perfectly ripe fruits.)

Or to take another example: You might think of “go for a run every morning” as a simple habit. But there are a lot of things that go into becoming the sort of person who actually finds it simple to go for a run every morning.

Here's what I mean. The best book I’ve ever read on becoming a runner is not one that centers around hacks like stacking your running habit with walking your dog. It’s The Non-Runner’s Marathon Trainer, which at first sounds like it will offer a training program. But of the book’s 300 pages, the training plan only takes up half a page (the bottom half of page two, to be exact).
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The rest of the book is what teaches you to be a runner. Before the introductory chapter is over, you’ve heard anecdotes from people who hated running and found it satisfying to train for a marathon, because it’s important to know that that dichotomy of thought is perfectly normal and does not need to stop you.