Triggers

For any behavioral science researcher, reader or even enthusiast (like me), there's a pretty commonly used word:

Trigger

It's borrowed from the military and arms world and it's used to talk about input and output in a behavioral context.

In brief, a trigger is the source of a habit. What does it mean? Well, let's think about a pretty common thing. Imagine yourself in the end of a very busy morning, doing a lot of tasks, reading emails, taking phone calls, and running to hit a deadline. In these moments, we rarely have time to think about things outside this context. Right? Suddenly, a scent comes through the window and, like in a cartoon, it hooks up to your nostrils sending a direct and solid message to your brain: Food! From here on, you won't be good to keep doing your work, until you satisfy this urge.

To put it in a diagram form, we have:

Firstly I want to say that, I really don't want to use the scientific terms here, remember, this is a regular guy's perspective of what I've learned. If you really want to get deep into behavioral science and habit building, I would recommend you James Clear's articles and his books. I can't even remember how did I get on James Clear's webpage but it's been so enlightening and helpful that I highly recommend anything he writes.

Input/Output

Well, with this said, let's focus on this input/output, action/reaction concept. I was always aware of the "for every action there is a reaction" thing. It's a secular concept but it also has a christian/biblical relative, which is my background. What I wasn't familiar with, is the trigger aspect of it. In order for you to take an action, you have to firstly be induced to do so. Of course, there’s habits that are so intrinsics in our routines, that we can’t easily identify its cause. Even so, it has a cause. It has a trigger.

The thing is that we are highly prone to habituate ourselves to doing things. The human being is adaptable. That makes us reduce the whole diagram above, to an automatic action, so we don't need to think it through.

When it's a good habit, like exercising, doing housework, putting things together, doing our jobs and etc, it's a remarkable blessing. There's nothing better than doing something good without noticing it, or suffering for it. It becomes natural, pleasant and makes it less time-consuming.

The problem is when a habit is a bad habit. Smoking, watching too much TV, gambling, insomnia caused by bad administration of time, and so it goes. Bad habits can turn you into a zombie. It can cause depression, destroy relationships, sabotage your work, make you loose your job. The list is huge.

But what can we do to have better habits or to kill bad ones?

The trigger.

In order for you to develop a good habit or stop doing things, that are not being healthy to you, you must find the trigger. You need to figure out what can make you start a good habit and what's the primarily cause of a bad habit.

If you want to start jogging or taking walks, maybe you should buy yourself some running shoes, or committing yourself to do this exercise with a friend. If you want to stop picking your cell phone every each 30 seconds, try to uninstall an application that you use the most. If you want to stop watching too much TV, why don't you try moving it to another room, or unplugging it from the wall socket?

A concept I was introduced by James Clear's book Transform Your Habits, is to use a trigger that was previously leading you to a bad habit, to create a good habit.

So, if once, watching a football game made you want to spend time playing football on a video game, you can try to change it and playing it in real life. Going outdoors, practicing freestyle tricks, learning fundamentals, even by your own.

If, after lunch, an overwhelming desire to eat candy floods your body, you could try changing the candy for a fruit.

I'm not saying it's easy, but we need to decide if our habits will shape us, or if we are going to shape our habits.

Personal-Triggers

The trigger that made me want to write this article, was a thought I was having this morning.

I believe that internet and social media shapes a lot of our habits nowadays. If from the 1910's to the 1950's, the movies and the radio shaped our culture and if from the 1960's to the 1990's the culture shaper was the TV, there’s no doubt that we are molded by the Internet now.

But we need to understand that, beyond the zeros and ones, there’s people producing what we consume. Behind the Buzzfeed or the Instagram, there’s people developing content that will transform, even in a small scale, your day or your life. So, even if sometimes we only see the internet monster, there's people controlling this monster. Writing this article makes me be in control of a small portion of the internet, and its impact on someone else’s life.

We can’t ask people to be more responsible and to think a little further on how negatively something on the internet can impact other people’s life. But we, as consumers, can think better and use this knowledge to stop consuming things that triggers our worst facets.

Of course we are responsible for what we do and how external things act in our lives. Once we realize it we have to be way more careful about what we consume. The sun and lemon juice aren't bad things, but please don't take a sun bath after wetting your skin with lemon juice. There are people that are great without having contact with other people or things.

If there's something in your timeline that you have figured out to be a trigger to a bad habit, unfollow it, delete it, report it. You can't accept someone else to trigger bad things in your life.

Don't wait for the bullet, or the damage it can cause to you. Look for the triggers and who's pulling it.