Master Habit Triggers to Unlock Your Best, Most Productive Life

Have you ever wanted to break a bad habit, but just feel like there’s so many habit triggers, and it gets triggered randomly. Like you’ll be in your house minding your own business, you play some music, and suddenly, the habit’s been triggered off. Well, you’re not alone on this.

Habit triggers can be one of the most important parts of building good habits, but also an important part in building bad habits. Habit triggers are when a certain behavior/cue triggers a habit automatically. For example, when you’re in the kitchen and start to feel an urge for a cookie.

Habit triggers are essential for both understanding how to build good habits, and how to break bad habits. Both of these powers can be used to enhance your productivity to unknown levels. Just imagine being able to break your bad habits and build your good ones

Without further ado, let’s get into it.

Understanding Habit Triggers and How They Shape Behavior

Habit triggers are cues that initiate an automatic behavior. They could be external or internal cues. Some external cues are places, objects, and time. While the main internal cues are your thoughts and your emotions. Furthermore, the behaviors triggered can be both good and bad.

In Atomic Habits, there is a habit loop which is cue, craving, response, and reward. The habit trigger sets off the cue, giving you a craving for a specific behavior. In addition, most habit loops discussed in under books always include a cue

Examples of Habit Triggers

Today, let’s use morning routines as our main example. When we are starting to wake up early, we always get a specific though in our head. This thought is always telling us to sleep longer. Don’t wake up yet, take your sweet time.

This thought is an internal cue, and it causes use to crave sleeping in. Let’s say we do wake up, however, we hear a notification. Now, we have a trigger of wanting to check our phone and crave doing it. These are both examples of bad triggers when we’re trying to wake up early.

An example of a good trigger would be wanting to work hard when the sun hasn’t risen yet. Now, since the sun hasn’t risen, we get a cue, leading to a craving of working hard. As you can see in all the examples, the cue/craving is almost instant

Because of how immediately the craving comes after the cue, it’s important to identify and control these triggers. The instant effect it can have on productivity can be either good or bad, and we want to harvest the good ones. We want the habit triggers that cause us to want to work hard, not to sleep and lie down.

Creating Positive Triggers to Supercharge Productivity

Positive triggers are a powerful way to build good habits, while creating desired behaviors to increase productivity. For example, if we set a certain time to always do our work, we start to want to do our work at that time.

For example, in our morning routine scenario, we decided to always wake up at 6 am. Now, every time you’re awake at 6 am, you feel really productive and crave working.

To create these positive habit triggers, there’s several strategies we can employ.

Strategies for Creating Positive Habit Triggers

The easiest one is to pair your productive habits with your current habits. If you always have a coffee in the morning, you can set having a coffee to doing an hour of work.

You can also use environmental cues to help increase your positive triggers. For example, you can decide that the only place you’ll eat is the kitchen. Now, you won’t get these strong cravings for food as much unless you’re in your kitchen. Changing your environment and setting rooms for specific actions can really help boost your motivation too.

You can also use technology as habit triggers. However, I don’t recommend this, since it’s more likely that you’ll start scrolling on your phone. Nevertheless, if you decide to use technology, you can make reminders that notify you to be productive. For example, having a reminder for doing your school work, or to go to the gym.

Breaking Bad Habits by Disrupting Negative Triggers

Just like how positive triggers can lead to good habits, bad triggers lead to bad habits. Some cues can cause you to crave something unproductive. For example, if you always watch YouTube after eating, you’re more likely to be unproductive immediately after eating.

The best way to identify these bad habits is to be conscious while you’re doing them. Ask yourself, “What lead up to this moment” and try to identify any potential cues. You can also track your behaviors to see if certain times/places cause these bad behaviors

To destroy these bad habits, there are several strategies. Most of these strategies are inverses of the positive ones

Strategies to Destroy Negative Habit Triggers

The first strategy you can employ is to remove the cue completely. Let’s take the morning routine as an example again. If on your way to your desk you see your PS5 and get cravings to play on it, you could remove it out of view. You don’t completely get rid of the PS5, but the cue no longer appears since it’s out of view. Simply removing the cue is the most effective way to destroy negative habit triggers.

Another strategy you can employ is replacing the response with a positive habit. If you remember, we said a habit loop has a cue, craving, response, and reward. The response is how you act in relation to that craving.

If ever time you feel a need to eat junk food you decide to take a walk, you’re building positive habits off negative cues. In turn, this will change these cues into positive triggers and you’ll suddenly no longer get the negative craving.

Another simple trick is to just alter your environment. If you feel sleepy working in your room, work somewhere else. Mindfulness and meditation often helps with recognizing and replacing bad habits. I strongly recommend you meditate if you’re struggling with any of these steps.

Practical Examples of Trigger-Based Habits for Success

One of the harder parts of creating trigger based habits is creating the trigger. A lot of people struggle to create reasonable triggers, so they end up failing. Here, I am gonna provide some examples of easy triggers you can do.

For morning routines, you can set a trigger of an alarm to start your morning routine. When you hear that alarm, you have to get up immediately. I recommend sleeping early the day when you’re starting to wake up early before so that when the alarm triggers you’re ready. Then, the trigger becomes engrained gradually.

For focus, you can use environmental triggers in order to improve it. Your habit trigger could be selecting a specific room where you do work and only work. If you don’t have a room to spare, try to pick a room that slightly compliments being focused. You can also make a study playlist where if these music play, you have to focus. I don’t recommend this since for me personally music distracts me, but you do you.

For health and fitness, you should pick a simple step in order to have it as your trigger. For me, I put on my workout clothes and it gets me in the zone. You could also have a trigger like watching a motivational YouTube video before.

You could also have some stress-relief triggers. For example, you can use a stress ball, deep breathing, or just simply taking a break to trigger relaxation. Or, you could use a planner to reduce your stress for the day.

No matter what you pick, make sure it’s an easy trigger to set up.

Conclusion

Controlling habit triggers gives you immense power to improve your productivity in all ways. You can break bad habits with ease, and create good habits with ease. Make sure to identify your habit triggers today, not tomorrow, right now. Leave some of your habit triggers in the comments below to keep track of them, and potentially help someone else with it. And remember as always,

Nothing changes if nothing changes