Here’s Why You Need “Non-Useful” Habits

I tried to prime my environment for good habits and instead discovered the importance of the ritual itself. Here is why you need non-useful habits.

I am a fan of Atomic Habits, the book authored by James Clear. The book describes how the repetition of atomic habits can change your behaviour. The author provides many realistic tips on how good habits can be formed. These tips avoid wishy-washy and hard to implement aspirational “tips” that are prone to failure due to exhaustion and fatigue. Instead, his tips are realistic and practical.

One of the tips from the book is to prime your environment for good habits. I found that in the mornings, I tend to be very stressed. I feel the pressure to get to the computer to start my workday. I also need to shower and brush my teeth. I need to make coffee. Morning always feels rushed. I felt like I had a thousand things to do, and no time to do it.

So, to streamline my morning ritual to ensure that I have a frictionless morning (before I start work), I implemented these nightly tasks to prime one single aspect of my environment to reduce the stresses of the morning-

1. Wash the french press
2. Grind 60g of coffee grounds
3. Place coffee grounds in the french press
4. Prepare the right quantity of water about 1 litre to be boiled in the kettle

The Original French Press

This new nightly ritual worked very well, almost immediately.

In the morning, I will put the electric kettle to boil and go to shower. By the time I am done showering, the water will have cooled down to about 90 degrees celsius. I will pour the hot water into the french press. I spent the 4 minutes steeping time brushing and flosssing my teeth. After that, I will bring my freshly brewed coffee to my work-from-home area and start my work for the day.

Finally, after all these years, I felt I finally developed an efficient morning ritual.

And I stopped ordering coffee deliveries.

To me, having a morning routine was a miracle all by itself. I saved time, felt less stressed and even reduced my expenses.

But then I discovered that there were even greater benefits arising out of the nightly nightly ritual. It was totally unexpected, and I am excited to share the same.

The Ritual Allows You To Build Other Habits By Adding On New Habits To the Ritual

After a couple of weeks of performing the nightly ritual, I decided to add just one additional non-related task to the ritual.

1. Wash french press
2. Grind coffee grounds
3. Place coffee grounds in the french press
4. Prepare the right quantity of water to be boiled in the kettle
5. Do At Least One Pull Up

Yes, do one pull-up. Just one pull-up! Right after I have prepared the coffee set up for the morning.

There was a time when I could do 20 pull-ups at one go. I have always wanted to regain that upper body strength needed to be able to do that. However, I have consistently failed to follow through with all the other, more ambitious, pull-ups training plans.

But because I was so used to the nightly ritual, and it has become a habit, I managed to stick with the additional pull-up task. I really did. It became part of something I did as part of a ritual.

I was surprised (ironically, at myself).

I can, of course, now do a lot more than one pull-up.

On closer analysis, I realised that what I did, by following the nightly ritual was to create a “cue” in the cue-habit-reward habit loop. The three stages of a habit are -

1. Cue — the thing that triggers the habit
2. Habit — either something you do which you hope to do again or to get rid of
3. Reward — the thing that makes you want to repeat the habit again

I realised I did not appreciate the degree to which cue is so vital for habit formation. In my case, it had to be the cue because the only reward for doing that one pull up was the satisfaction of having done it.

Frankly, the cue is so strong now that I feel the urge to have to do a pull-up just thinking about having to grind coffee beans. You have no idea how many pull-ups I did just writing this post.

What is surprising to me was that the “cue” was a nightly priming ritual that was not related to pull-ups in the slightest. In fact, it had nothing to do with physical fitness. How did I not realise this earlier?

The Ritual Is the Key

In Les misérable, Victor Hugo, in a beautiful passage describing the bishop, said -

It seemed to be a necessary ritual that he should prepare himself for sleep by meditating under the solemnity of the night sky… a mysterious transaction between the infinity of the soul and the infinity of the universe.

He goes on —

He contemplated the grandeur, and the presence of God; the eternity of the future, that strange mystery; the eternity of the past, a stranger mystery; all the infinities hidden deep in every direction; and, without trying to comprehend the incomprehensible, he saw it.

Unlike the remarkable and lofty ritual of the bishop, all I want to do is to read more books and to be inspired by the words of great authors.

I find it very difficult to sustain the attention required to read books (I blame the internet age). But now, armed with my experience with the nightly ritual, I realised that the trick is to find a ritual that can act as a cue.

Sure, it can be a useless ritual, but I decided to create one that helps to further prime my environment.

On some mornings, I find myself with these minor annoyances —

1. I could not find my wallet, and my keys
2. I feel anxious that my mobile phone was running out of battery

This is particularly stressful if I have an appointment outside and I am running late. (Yes, I do not have the habit of planning in advance).

So in addition to the nightly ritual, I devised an evening ritual, which, in its simplicity, seemingly idiotic -

1. Find my wallet and car keys
2. Find my external charger (for my mobile devices)
3. Connect the external charger to the power socket to charge it
4. Place the wallet and car keys next to the electric charger
5. Finish reading at least ten pages of a book (pre-selected)

This new evening ritual will be performed even if I was staying home the whole day tomorrow. For some reason, this works really well. And the next day, I had the extra benefit of knowing exactly where my wallet and car keys were. And I will always have a fully charged external battery to bring out with me, if I need it.

That has really helped to calm me down.

And more importantly, I actually really started looking forward to charging my external charger and reading good old books.

WIth that experience, I am beginning to suspect that as long as you can compel yourself to sit down on a special sofa for 10 minutes and meditate for a short while, say 3 minutes; you are likely to create a habit loop that involves meditating (instead of watching TV) after sitting down on that special sofa. Cues can really be pretty much anything.

I have not tried that yet, but I will have a go at that one day.

In the interest of transparency, I must mention that this method is not foolproof (though it is simple).

I tried but have some difficulty in sustaining a workout habit and no amount of wearing workout clothes or shoes will ever make me associate the ritual of putting on workout clothes with anything but pain. The workout itself made me hate the ritual instead. I think that has more to do with the reward function of the habit loop, so I am still trying to figure that one out.

In the meantime, please let me know if you have any ideas for rituals which can act as good cues for habits!

Live long and prosper.