Friction is our friend and our enemy
The Holly Body Whisperer Challenge: Insight 6
At Holly Health, we’re running a 2 week body whisperer challenge, to kick start 2021 with a compilation of body and mind related insights. Each insight is accompanied by a mini challenge, something easy to do or think about, to put your new learning into action. Follow this account, to see when the next article is published.
By now, and particularly if you use the Holly beta, you know a bit about habit formation. To wrap up the body whisperer challenge, let’s learn a little more about what combination of things need to be in place for new habits to be successful.
The aptly named, COM-B model of behaviour change (Mitchie et al. 2011), is used extensively by current day psychologists. It suggests that for behaviour (B) to change, three components: capability (C ); opportunity (O); and motivation (M), come into play. Capability is how able you are to do something, opportunity relates to the environment and whether you have what you need to do the behaviour, and motivation relates to emotional desires and feelings around an action.
If we have low motivation, then the harder something is (capability), the less likely we are to do it. Additionally, if we’re motivated and capable, but don’t have the specific tools (opportunity) to do the behaviour, we’re stuck. Anything which makes something harder to do, can be referred to as friction. By addressing a friction around a behaviour, and thinking about whether it’s impacting our motivation, capability or opportunity, we can increase our chances of success.
Two practical things we can do to address friction:
1) Set the bar low initially
By setting the bar low, we increase our capability to perform the action, and reduce friction.
For example, this could involve starting a habit of 5 press ups a day, not 50, or 1 portion of vegetables with lunch, not 5. This approach, of starting small and building up from there, is highly recommended in books like Atomic Habits and Tiny Habits, we suggest either of these as helpful reads!
2) Design the environment to help us
Once we’ve defined our habit, and ensured that it’s small enough, it’s helpful to think about what else in our environment (e.g. our house/fridge/wardrobe/bedroom) may affect our opportunity to follow through. The aim is to give ourselves the best opportunity to perform.
Something else to consider is that friction around an action isn’t always bad. In fact, in some cases, friction can be helpful. As an example — let’s say I want to set myself a new behaviour of jogging 3 times a week in the mornings, and I then rope in a friend to jog with me at 7am. Now, if I wake up not really fancying my jog, I would have to send a message and let my friend down! So, I get up, get on with it, and am thankful afterwards for sticking to the plan. Planning my behaviour with someone else created helpful friction.
Your Mini Challenge
Pick a behaviour or habit which you’d like to do more or less of. Maybe it’s a health behaviour, for example, to do with nutrition, exercise, sleep or mental wellbeing.
For this habit, think about 1 unhelpful friction, with a potential fix, and 1 helpful friction. Here are some examples to get you going:
Of course you don’t need to write out a table. Just going through the thought process is likely to help you spot something you can do to make your habit more successful!
Holly Health content, insights, and recommendations come from our excellent team of psychologists, nutritionists, and health coaches. Ultimately our goal is to support millions to create and sustain healthy lifestyle changes, for disease prevention and better quality of life. You can learn more (and join the beta service) at hollyhealth.io.