The Best Keystone Habit And 7 Tips To Create It Now, Ironclad!

What is the best keystone habit? But, before that, what is a keystone habit? What is a keystone?

Keystone: A central stone at the summit of an arch, locking the whole together.

A keystone habit, a term coined by Charles Duhigg in The Power of Habit, is a habit that has a ripple effect and leads to multiple other habits and actions, kind of a domino effect or a chain reaction.

This is also sometimes termed a linchpin habit, a habit that holds other things together after linchpin (a pin passed through the end of an axle to keep the wheel in position).

Now we understand keystone habits or linchpin habits are habits that tend to have a profound impact on our lives (obviously, we hope for a positive impact, but negative keystone habits are not uncommon, for example, drinking every evening that leads to poor eating habits, couch-potato habits and disturbed sleep).

Various authors have proposed keystone habits to cultivate including:

• Making your bed in the morning
• Exercising every day
• Drinking a glass of water every day
• Eating a piece of fruit every day
• 10 minutes of meditation every day
• Reading an article every day

The list goes on and on, and many of these are positive habits worth forming.

However, is any one of these the best keystone habit, the best linchpin habit to form? I doubt it. While important, these habits are not really keystone (holding all the arch stones together) or linchpin (holding different pieces together).

What we really need is one fundamental habit that will help us build habits for success in life, for buildings systems for success in life!

What is the best keystone habit or best linchpin habit?

Think about what is involved in building a simple habit like drinking a glass of water every day in the morning or taking a 5 minute walk after dinner. Lally et al., 2010, found it takes anywhere from 18 days to 254 days, in other words, habit formation is highly variable.

What if we did undertake to form one of the simple habits described above, but with a very different intent: our focus is on understanding our habit formation and maintenance idiosyncrasies.

What helps me form a habit? Which habits are easier for me? How can I accelerate the formation of a habit? How can I make a habit stronger?

What we are really building is the habit of forming positive habits for success in life, a kind of meta-habit, that guides us with the habit formation process, so we can continue to build more and more habits that form a chain reaction, a domino effect. Isn’t that really what a keystone habit or a linchpin habit is?

If we can do that, then that, to me, is really the best keystone habit to form, with life-changing implications from building a host of positive habits to eventually building systems for success.

Neuroscience and psychology offer clues on how we can build this best keystone habit: the habit of forming positive habits scientifically.

How to form the best keystone habit?

The 7 tips below are tips for forming the best keystone habit: the habit of forming new positive habits. These tips when implemented, will turbocharge your habit formation process! You will forming and maintaining new habits much easier.

Tip #1: Start with the simplest habit

Once you realize what the keystone habit is, then you want to start with something so easy, you just can’t fail! The goal is to train your brain to learn that it can form a habit, and to do that, you want something you can repeat consistently, day after day.

Consistent repetition within a cue or context forms the automaticity, the reflex behavior – a habit.

Here, you need to know yourself: what is easy for you? Drinking a glass of water, making your bed, meditating for 5 minutes, exercising? Think carefully, you will do this every day, day after day! As we saw earlier, people are highly variable when it comes to forming a habit.

What you are teaching the brain is the concept of a small win: I can successfully form a simple habit – I can repeat something consistently, day after day.

From neuroscience, we know that when we start a habit, the neural circuit for the habit is like a path in the jungle, difficult to cut our way through. With repetition, the path becomes more traveled, the path becomes wider.

If our habit becomes a strong habit, the path transforms to a highway through the jungle, we effortlessly complete the habit actions.

Tip #2: Perform the habit in the morning, the earlier the better

Research in neuroscience has shown that in the morning, the first 8 hours after waking up, the neurotransmitters dopamine, adrenaline (epinephrine) and cortisol are at elevated levels in our bodies. As explained by Dr. Huberman, a neuroscientist from Stanford, these neurochemicals prime our body for action and focus.

Anything that you want to accomplish during the day, and have had difficulty with, you should re-schedule for the morning, the earlier, the better. This is how we overcome limbic friction, our natural instinct to do the easy thing (sit in front of the TV), instead of the right thing (working out).

Obviously, this also means, the stuff that we do mechanically or the things that we know we don’t need this extra push for, we should move to after this period.

8 hours after waking is the most important period of the day, don’t squander it on activities that don’t count.

To increase your chances of completing the habit you selected, make sure you schedule it for this period, if not pick another habit. If your habit was to walk 5 minutes after dinner, change it to making the bed in the morning or drinking a glass of water in the morning.

Your will power, self-discipline and motivation are much, much lower later in the day. If you are counting on these to help you, think again! You are doomed to failure. You don’t have the right neurochemistry in your body.

The goal is to ensure that you will be successful.

Tip #3: Visualize the habit sequence

Visualization, the exercise of mentally walking through the sequence of steps to complete the habit, is a critical part of the puzzle. Research in psychology has shown that people who do this, even only once, have a much greater likelihood of completing the habit, repeatedly.

What visualization does is fire the same neurons that are needed to physically complete the habit, so the neural circuit becomes more traveled.

What neuroscience research on visualization has shown is that we don’t always need to physically execute the habit actions, even a mental exercise fires the same neurons, and we get more and more adept at completing the habit.

Visualization is extensively used by Olympic and world-class athletes, because it works! The richer the visualization, the better the results. The more often you perform the habit mentally, the stronger the habit gets.

Tip #4: Bracket the habit action

Another very interesting tidbit from psychology and neuroscience, the activities immediately before and after the habit also matter! These activities bracket the task, the habit actions.

Interestingly, these activities fire separate neurons in a different part of the brain, but prime you for completing the habit actions. These activities are roughly the 10-15 minutes before and after the habit actions.

Suppose the habit I want to build is “Swimming every day for 10 minutes.” The activities bracketing the task are:

• Before: Changing into my swimming outfit, collecting my towel, and going to my basement pool.
• Habit actions: Wearing my goggles and swim cap, entering the pool, swimming 10 laps.
• After: Drying myself, heading to my shower, showering.

When I visualize the habit, I include the before and after activities in the visualization, and spread the reward, a satisfying hot shower across the entire sequence.

We can do the same with the simple habits we are building initially. If your habit action is “Drinking a glass of water”, include the activities of going to the kitchen for coffee and the sipping of coffee on your desk as part of the visualization.

If you can bracket the habit in a compelling manner, the execution of the habit actions themselves becomes more effortless. What science is telling us is to chunk the task bracketing with the habit itself: when we visualize or perform the habit, focus on task bracketing. , reward ourselves, and so forth.

The context / cue for the habit, as established through task bracketing, becomes a strong foundation to propel us to complete the habit actions.

Tip #5: Make the habit flexible

How do you know if the habit is strong? To gauge habit strength, you need to move it around.

Are you still performing the habit if it is later in the morning? What if you are somewhere else, not at the normal location?

Interestingly, using a specific time as a cue to trigger the habit is not very useful. Our body and mind don’t really respond well to something like “At 9:30 am, I will drink a glass of water”.

Cues like location and event are much better: “Before breakfast, I will drink a glass of water” or “When I go to the kitchen to make my morning coffee, I will drink a glass of water”.

These are better, especially if you will be at location every day or the event will happen every day, consistently.

Time is not a good cue because what if you are in an important meeting at 9:30 am or have to take care of your baby at that time today? Life happens, something will pop up – we cannot let that defeat our consistency.

Flexibility is a very important determiner of habit strength, and when you are flexible, you can respond to the unexpected, and still perform the habit.

Tip #6: Make it an identity-based habit

Identity-based habits are habits that spring from your very identity, from who you are (or who you desire to be). To have enduring change, lasting success in life, we have to change from the very core, from who we are (How To Change Your Life For Better? Change Your Identity (In 3 Steps!).

This identity shift results in subtle nuances in how we think, what we say, and have deep implications on our actions and behavior.

• I am slim. I value nutritious food. I “don’t” eat ice cream sundaes.
• I am a blogger. I value sharing my experiences. I write every day.

Two studies in psychology found:

• Embracing an identity with long-term commitment resulted in greater than 400% performance improvement compared to those without the commitment (practicing for the same amount of time).
• Pyschological empowerment comes from identity, and changes to language feedback to the identity: “I don’t” vs “I can’t”. People who adopted “I don’t” in their language embraced an identity and were much more likely than people who adopted “I can’t” to avoid a tempting chocolate bar, instead, opting for a healthier granola bar.

When you adopt a habit like “I will do 3 pushups every day,” start strong by embracing an identity like:

I am a fit person for the rest of my life. I value my physical strength and ability. I do 3 pushups every day. I “don’t” sit in front of the TV all the time.

Your very identity protects you against temptation, propels you to positive decisions and actions.

Tip #7: Pay the price for the habit

A very perceptive piece of advice from Scott Adams (the creator of Dilbert and a proponent for building systems for success in life): “If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it.“

When creating new habits, we push ourselves out of a comfort zone of known habits, routines and behaviors. Whatever we do comes with a price, a cost.

• If I want to be fit, the cost is time spent working out and the effort expended.
• If I want to be slim, the cost is consciously opting for a balanced diet, reducing calories.
• If I want to be a blogger, the cost is time and effort to gain writing skills, technical skills and writing.

The price though is negotiable. You can reframe the 100s hours in the gym to 5 minutes for 3 pushups every day to be fit. You can reframe the years to become a professional blogger, to 25 minutes (a Pomodoro cycle) every day spent writing and acquiring blogging expertise and skills.

When we are successful at these simpler levels, we scale up into bigger habits, routines and success systems.

The key, though, is to understand a price has to be paid, and plan accordingly. If the best keystone habit is very important to me, I will budget the time and effort for it, and re-prioritize something else to be done later.

What this does is move you from a dreamer to a do-er!

You have know the price, you have committed and paid the price!

Bonus Tip: Follow the basic advice on habits

Habit formation and habit maintenance have been extensively studied in the past few years. Many seminal books and articles have been published.

A short summary of the basic strategies we can use to put our habit on a solid foundation can be found here.

Habits for success in life

If you look closely at successful people, both the really famous ones all over the world or the day-to-day people around you, you quickly notice something in common: they have positive habits that drive their success! Not only that, they have learned the best keystone habit, the habit of forming positive habits that will lead to success in life!

Let’s take one example: Benjamin Franklin, our Founding Father (he is the one on the $100 bill!) and famous inventor. Less known is the fact that Franklin spent the bulk of his life perfecting habits for pursuing 13 virtues he deemed desirable: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity and humility.

Not only that, he understood the concepts behind the best keystone habit, the habit of forming positive habits for success in life, and systematically pursued many of the tips described above!

Make the best keystone habit ironclad

How to make your habit foolproof, ironclad?

Reframe the habit

Consciously design the habit in a foolproof way that makes it easy to execute every day!

Instead of a habit like “I will do 30 minutes cardio every other day” or “I will do upper body weight training every other day”, frame the habit as “I will do 30 minutes exercise every day” (no failed days in between) or even better, “I will be physically active for 30 minutes every day.”

If there is a blizzard and you cannot go to the gym, you can still vacuum the house, and get enough steps!

What you need to realize is that life happens: emergencies occur, we fall sick, we go on vacation!

The trick to making any habit ironclad is to allow for momentary or deeper lapses, but have a recovery plan. There are two strategies tied to this:

2 Day Rule

In the formative stages of the habit, lapses should not be tolerated, instead try to reframe the habit for success (as above). I am very alert to missing the habit, I know what neuroscience has said above, and my aim is to get the neural circuits to a highway as soon as possible.

During habit maintenance, if for some reason, you do not perform the habit one day, make every attempt to complete it the next day. Never skip 2 days in a row, then skipping the habit becomes the habit! Several psychological studies have shown missing one day is bad, but not fatal, to the continuation of the habit.

Fresh starts

Ideally, this rule should apply only in the habit maintenance phase, where the habit is already formed well. If you miss several days of performing the habit (say, you couldn’t exercise because of an injury or sickness), anchor in some key days to start the habit afresh.

Such key anchor days could be calendar-based (Sunday of the week, start of the month, New Year) or event-based (birthday or anniversary) or similar. The idea is to have a fallback plan to get back on the wagon, if you fall off!

Experiment with trial and error

As we move past the first habit, we need to gain confidence in our meta habits and the keystone habit, the habit for forming new positive habits.

What we need is a research protocol that helps us acquire this confidence, initially with simple habits, and gradually, with harder habits.

Dr. Huberman describes one such protocol that involves cycles of experiment and test:

• Habit Formation Phase: First 21 days into the cycle: select 4-6 positive habits, and use the accelerated habit formation tips provided up to build the habit. In this phase, you are consciously performing the habits.
• Habit Test Phase: Next 14 or 21 days: test the strength of these habits by seeing which ones you continue to perform, without significant conscious effort. Those that are formed well, you can move to habit maintenance strategies, others you can continue into the next cycle along with new habits you want to form.

Another simpler option is to use the start of the month to move into the first habit formation phase, and after 3 weeks, the habit test phase for the remainder of the month.

How well did you form the keystone habit? That depends on how long it takes you to form a habit in each of these cycles: if you are close to the 18 days, you are doing very well, and have adopted the accelerated habit formation tips well.

If you are closer to the 254 mark that Lally et al. found, then you need to work on the tips above! Examine what you need to focus on to improve.

Building systems for success

Building positive habits for success in life is but the start. But the same strategies that we use to accelerate habit formation can be applied to build systems for success – systems that will help us succeed in our chosen career, our hobbies like blogging, sports and any endeavor that we undertake.

A system is nothing more than a collection of actions, habits, routines and workflows. For example, my system for writing blog posts is described here, and includes a detailed workflow.

How can I ensure that I successfully complete performing the tasks in the system, day after day, consistently? Such a system has complicated tasks that definitely cannot be performed like a habit, reflexively, on auto-pilot.

The trick is to use the same 7 tips we described above, but also to trigger a system task or a routine using a habit. For example, I focus on the creative steps in the morning, when my body and brain are tuned for concentration and action. I make my morning elixir, a hot cup of latte (as the before task bracketing).

Before I take the first sip, I start a Pomodoro timer (the trigger / cue) to start 25 minutes of uninterrupted writing. With my coffee (temptation bundling), I write, and I write. Most days, I go beyond the timer, and can execute multiple Pomodoros during the day.

But there are still bad days, where I stop with the timer. But I have still won, I have performed the minimum for the blogging routine that I have set for myself! I have consistently executed my blogging system!

Success in life requires effort and planning. But with the keystone habit and the 7 tips, we set ourselves for success! If I can do it, so can you!