I remember being the kid who despised exercise. My mom would ask me to join her and my father for a jog around the park every weekend, but I always came up with excuses like wanting to sleep or watch television. Truthfully, I lacked motivation and failed to see the purpose of exerting myself through running or repetitive movements. However, when I turned 10, I found my inspiration to exercise: I wanted to look like Superman.
Fast forward 18 years to today, and many of my friends, and even strangers, refer to me as the “big guy” who hits the gym six times a week (sometimes more) and rarely misses a workout. I’ve gained 40 kg of lean muscle since eighteen years ago. How did I transform from someone who hated exercise as a kid to someone who is passionately in love with working out?
According to Charles Duhigg in his book ‘The Power of Habit,’ habits occur within our brains, specifically in the basal ganglia, following a three-step loop: the cue, routine, and reward. In the 90s, driven by the curiosity of understanding human habits, MIT researchers attached a brainwave scanner to the skull of a rat and placed it in a T-shaped maze with one end filled with chocolate. Initially, the rat would cautiously navigate the maze, exploring its surroundings, sniffing, scratching, and following its way to the reward—chocolate. The experiment was repeated multiple times, and each time the rat became faster at navigating the maze. Eventually, the rat would swiftly race through the maze to its reward without any hesitation.
So, what did the brain scanner reveal? When the rat encountered the maze for the first time, its brain experienced a surge of activity as it processed an overwhelming amount of new information: new scents, sights, and surroundings. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for decision-making, processed this information to help the rat find its way to the reward. As the rat repeated the same routine over and over, its mental activity decreased, the decision-making center of the brain quieted down, but the basal ganglia remembered. All the rat had to do was recall the fastest path to the chocolate. Within a week, the rat internalized the routine, making it more automatic—a habit—and sprinted through the maze to its reward without any hesitation.
This internalization, the way the rat moved through the maze to reach the chocolate, was stored in the basal ganglia. It can be broken down into the three-step habit loop:
- Cue: A trigger that prompts the brain to enter automatic mode (the clicking sound when the partition door of the maze opened).
- Routine: The automatic behavior, which can be mental or physical (navigating the maze).
- Reward: A signal to the brain that reinforces the habit’s significance (the chocolate).
These are the secret ingredients for forming an exercise habit: a cue to trigger the habit and a reward to reinforce it. If I were to list the three-step habit loop for my workout routine, it would look like this:
- Cue: My alarm goes off at 5 am.
- Routine: I head to the gym for an intense workout.
- Reward: I look at myself in the mirror and feel like Superman. 🙂
I assume that by this point, as you read, you might already have in mind what your cue, routine, and reward for exercise are. That’s great! Now, the final ingredient to make your habit loop work is to believe in yourself. Believe that all the hard work you put into your habit will eventually pay off. Believe in yourself just as much as my 10-year-old self did, aspiring to be as big as Superman (I’m still far from it, but I’m closer than I ever was). After all, success, in a nutshell, is just a game of not quitting.
“Success, in a nutshell, is just a game of not quitting.”
