The Power of a Hard-Wired Habit: Changing Your Hobby of Writing into your Identity

Don't underestimate the power or the difficulty of forming a writing habit that fits your life. There are many books available about the power of small habits, a trend created by the massive bestseller Atomic Habits by James Clear. There's a good reason for the massive success of that book and for the trend of other books riding the tail of its success: it is the little things we repeat on a daily basis that develop the neural pathways that dictate our lives, resulting in the old saying, 'Change your habits, change your life.' If you want to change who you are, you simply need to change the little things you do repeatedly.

Our brains are wired for survival, to the point where we rely on neural shortcuts, called heuristics, so that we conserve mental energy for 'important' tasks—such as working, learning, and relationship building—and minimize thinking when doing routine tasks. Heuristics are why we cut each other off in discussions because we assume we know what the other person is going to say. It's how we're able to zone out while driving. It's why we buy certain brands without completely weighing the cost with the benefit—something is triggered that skips past the continuous analysis of what we are doing because we assume the outcome is predictable based upon specific routines.

Basically, we go on autopilot when we fall into habits. You don't require yourself to think when you habitually play that game or watch TV or eat that bag of chips. You don't weigh the pros and cons or health benefits or risks. Some of our habits are learned as coping mechanisms to trigger doses of dopamine when we are stressed and need to wind down. The problem with dopamine is that there are shortcuts to releasing it, but these shortcuts or hacks are rarely good for us, and since they are easy, we repeat them until they become habitual—a cigarette, a vape, a video game, a doom scroll. On the other hand, a 'good' habit, such as exercising, reading, or writing, is also a learned behavior that does not demand a high threshold of decision-making to follow through, if it is in fact repeated enough to become a habit, and is triggered by certain cues, whether it's the quiet morning with an hour to spare or a specific room you walk into where you write. A good habit can be formed and become just as hardwired into our brains as a bad one.

Habits are hard to break because adult neural pathways, compared to children, are thicker and stronger, though fewer, and intended to help us adapt to our responsibilities that keep us alive and happy. And when these neural pathways become thicker, they become 'ruts' and paths of least resistance. They become our default thinking.

What does this have to do with someone like you and me who live busy lives and want to establish ourselves as writers? We need to use our brain's ability to automate the act of writing into a hard-wired habit so that we are able to write productively for short bursts of time throughout the week no matter how we feel or how busy we get.

After all, you don't have time to think about whether you should write and weigh all of your other responsibilities. You don't have the energy to work yourself up to writing when you either have a long day of work and responsibilities in front of you or you have just finished a long day of work and only have a half hour or hour to spend writing—if you start right now! You just need your brain to switch into a writing gear on its own and power you through that short period of time on a repeated basis.

If you struggle with consistent productivity, it is most likely the missing component of a hardwired habit. But habitual writing won't come as quickly as a bad habit forms because there is no instant gratification or dopamine hit to establish that habit. Instead, non-dopamine triggered habits where there is no current strong capacity will require discomfort, repetition, willpower, and probably some pain. It's like pushing yourself to exercise for the first time in months. It's going to wear you out. You're not going to feel good. You won't produce much writing, or if you do, it likely won't be great. So what will keep you going long enough that the writing becomes easy and productive no matter how much time you have to write each day and week? Your goal of becoming a published writer. It's a belief that you will become the thing you repeat day in, day out. Writing makes you a writer. Yes, I know that on a more fundamental basis that if you are like me, you have always considered yourself a writer even when you struggled with producing publish-worthy writing. However, there comes a moment when a young adult becomes an adult, when an Army recruit becomes a soldier, when a student becomes the teacher. When the person who dreams of becoming a writer writes. Daily. No matter what.

The problem, of course, is that as soon as we are ready to sit down and write, we are probably already stressed about what the day holds or what the day has put us through, and we might afford ourselves a little 'mercy' and instead of writing give ourselves a little brain break. For example, we might have a full 30 minutes at the beginning, middle, or end of our workday that is unassigned and unstructured, and it will always be easy to release yourself from responsibility to spend that time doing other habits that are already automated when you are bored or tired or stressed. What if you counted up the amount of time you spent watching YouTube, TikTok, sports, or movies? Or added up your hours on the internet or spent gaming? If you are in a situation like me, with a very busy life and very little time to write or create content, then those hours matter. You might not have much time in your day, but if you use that little bit of time to do a little writing daily, you are literally producing writing or content every single day, and over time, you will have used those little opportunities to your advantage.

Yes, 20 minutes of writing is nothing in the grand scheme of things. It's a drop in the ocean. But if you spend 20 minutes writing three or four times a week or more, and you are productive in those 20 minutes, then over the span of weeks, you will have produced multiple chapters of a book.

I have talked about this habit-building approach to writing in the book I published in 2024, but what I didn't talk about in that book is what I have recently learned: that when your circumstances change dramatically, your habit of writing that you have worked so hard to hone can suffer a major setback. Sometimes transplanting habits you've had in different circumstances can also be very difficult. For example, let's say you have a brand-new schedule at your job or that you have changed jobs completely. Or maybe you're like me and have recently moved to a different state in a different time zone with a new workplace and a completely new system to learn.

My current job is far more taxing, emotionally and physically, than the same job I was doing last year. However, I'm not using that as an excuse to change my writing goals. After about three months, I have discovered that dramatic changes in your life can mess up the equilibrium of your nervous system on which your creative mind is dependent. I am trying to adjust my bedtime, cope with stress in a healthier way, eat better, and adjust my writing goals so that I'm not disheartened by my decrease in productivity. I will get there and am getting closer to my prior production every day. But when you are building a new writing regimen or new writing habits, or adapting your writing time and ritual to a new schedule or circumstance, you have to give yourself some grace, you have to set some boundaries, and you need to listen to your biofeedback: your body, your brain, and your emotions.

Push yourself when you should be pushed. That means when you've got 20 minutes to write in your weekday or two hours a day on the weekend, and you have the energy to do so, be sure to spend it writing! But if you choose to doom scroll through YouTube Shorts instead, then you need to take better control of your executive functioning and discipline yourself during those moments of downtime. You need to put the phone away, get out your computer or typewriter, and start hammering away at that story.

Writing is not just a hobby or activity. It is the highest order of brain function—the manifestation of ideas, emotions, and images into words—the process of turning the abstract of the writer's mind into the literal translation of words that exist in the world outside of our bodies and then, with the process of reading, change back to the abstract imagination and emotions of the reader. We can't minimize what a powerful force creation is. So we can't ignore the importance of taking care of our needs and our physical and emotional health so that we are living in the sublime of imagination rather than the pit of strife.

But here is the most amazing thing that will happen when you have developed a resilient writing habit: you will advance in cognitive strength and stamina and experience, whereas so many people are depending upon AI and going backwards in these areas. AI is a shortcut. It is the ultimate heuristic. But there is no shortcut for human wisdom, experience, and writing. The real writer of the future will become a rarity, a priceless resource.

For those of you who don't have time, energy, or convenience to write, do it anyway until it becomes a habit, and that habit changes your life.

* I talk about these things in my book, Manifest Your Story in 21 Days. You can have it for free if you just fill out the little form below, and maybe it will help you make your next breakthrough: https://forms.gle/uDfH9kGbBt59NwLU7