Let’s review how a habit is forming. Imagine you are working on a computer and suddenly a message pops up that a new email has arrived. This is an impulse, a trigger that stimulates your brain to act accordingly. Your reaction to this is very likely to switch to the email program. You are reading the message and as a reward for following the impulse, you get a brief release of dopamine. The same applies of course to new text messages on the relevant channels.

Over time, a habit develops that is so strong that the desire for the reward is directly triggered: if for any reason you do not respond to the trigger, your brain triggers a reaction that encourages you to behave in this way. And that is the corresponding desire.

Changing behavior for new habits

Research in this area over the past decades has shown that up to 95 percent of what we are doing every day is either habitual or an automatic response to our environment. And only about five percent are conscious and intentional. In other words, our conscious will only affects a small part of our daily activities – which explains, among other things, why we are spending too much time on urgent things and too little time on the really important and essential things.

Developing an inner drive and conscious intentions for what you want to achieve therefore only takes you about five percent along the way that you want to go. To go the rest of the way effectively, you will need to fill your days with beneficial habits. You need to form thinking habits, beliefs, reactions, and behavior patterns that will help you achieve what you want. The principle is to focus on what you want to do differently in the future: focus on the new habit to be developed, not on what you want to get rid of. Thus, if you want to stop smoking, don’t focus on how to remove cigarettes from your life. Instead, focus on what you want to do differently in the future – or what you want to do in those moments in which you previously smoked. Focus on forming the new habit. You need to move from using willpower to establishing automatic, habitual behavior. And this is especially important because the less you have to think about something, the less energy and willpower you will need, and the more energy and resources you will have to do it.

One of the keys to forming new habits is focus. Let’s look at the effects of a lack of focus: The average employee checks for new emails every ninety seconds while sitting at the computer, or every three minutes if only the smartphone is available. NASA was one of the first institutions to conduct an investigation into the relationship between quickly switching between tasks and the time it takes to do them. The result shows that, in addition to losing 10-15% of our intellectual capacity, we need up to 25% more time when switching back and forth between different tasks. Even if it’s only a matter of seconds at a time, over a whole week, we are losing several hours of productivity in this way.

The more frequently we switch back and forth between tasks and the more often we are distracted by other employees, emails, phone calls, or inner impulses, the more often our brain triggers the desire for the reward – and we are finding ourselves in a vicious circle.