The routine is the bracketed set of actions you perform upon seeing a cue in order to get a reward. Changing this allows you to make what has become pathological, a bad habit, and transform it into something that is positive, but it requires a certain level of deeper thought and reflection.
To illustrate this, it’s necessary to choose a specific example. Consider an individual who always craves a sweet food after eating a savoury meal. The cue – routine – reward loop here seems somewhat easy to detect:
This is not the way to look at these things, however. The dessert itself is not the reward, it is a piece of food that creates a reward in the brain, via dopamine, and it is up to that individual to work out why. Perhaps they are simply still hungry and so are rewarded for eating more food. Perhaps their meal was very low in fat and/or carbohydrates and so satiating signals are not being released either owing to certain macronutrient requirements not being met and/or because of the resultant low palatability of their meal. Perhaps the individual is stressed and/or tired and so is craving sweet comfort foods that remind them of the desserts they would eat as a child.
Once this ‘true desire’ is identified, it is simply a case of recognising the craving and using mindfulness to perform a different set of behaviours that play more in to the positive lifestyle that the individual is hoping to lead. The first two options listed above are somewhat easy to ‘fix’ by altering the meal or choosing a healthier dessert option, the latter craving could be satisfied by spending quality time with a loved one or pet, playing video games, listening to music or otherwise unwinding in a manner that they find enjoyable.
The person who has a glass of wine every night and wants to change that could work out why they started doing it in the first place (to relax, for the taste, to help with sleep) and then look to meet that need in some other way. The person who habitually has a takeaway on Friday nights or who hits the drive thru after work need only look to why they want the food that they go for (convenience, associated happy memories) and then look for a different meal that meets that need. The same principle can apply to almost any habit you can think of, and although the root cause may not always be immediately clear and you may not meet the craving that you have with the first new routine that you try, it can be life-changing.
Changing one variable while still respecting the deeply engrained habit loop is a sure fire way to reach success because eventually this new more adaptive habit will overlay and replace the old one. After a while this new good habit will be just as automatic as the old one was, so long as the variables stay the same, success will happen without ever paying attention.