by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
The Habit Loop is What Happens Your Habits Keep Bringing You Back to The Same Place (Whether it’s a REAL or Unreal Place is Up To You)
It can be a pretty difficult pill to swallow but to a far greater degree than most people realise, the life you’re living right now is a consequence of your habitual ways of doing things.
I’m not just talking about the obvious habits like brushing your teeth, going to the gym, or scrolling your phone before bed but the deeper and often invisible ones that can guide our whole lives:
- How you identify yourself.
- How you react to discomfort.
- How you handle emotions.
- How you show up in relationships.
- How you speak to yourself when nobody is listening.
- Etc. etc. etc.
These kind of habits are the ones that really shape your life – even if you’re not conscious of them and so they’re driving you from beneath the surface of yourself.
Really, all of this brings us to an uncomfortable truth:
If your life doesn’t feel REAL and instead feels flat, disconnected, frustrating, or like something is ‘missing’, then it’s most likely because your habits are keeping you on the surface of life instead of allowing you to go deeper into it.
In other words, you’re habitually choosing resistance over acceptance without even knowing it and that choice, repeated over time, becomes your ‘reality’.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
The Habit Loop: What We Cover in This Article
- The Habit Loop is What Happens Your Habits Keep Bringing You Back to The Same Place (Whether it’s a REAL or Unreal Place is Up To You)
- A Necessary Disclaimer: It’s Not All on You
- The Hidden Depth of Habit
- Resistance vs Realness
- The Three Levels of Real Habits: Body, Mind, & Vision
- The Less Obvious Habits That Change Everything
- Reverse Engineering Your Life to Get Out of the Habit Loop
- From Resistance to Realness: Practical Steps for Changing the Habit Loop
- The Habit Loop: You Are What You Repeat
A Necessary Disclaimer: It’s Not All on You
Before we go any further, let’s ground this in actual reality:
Saying that your habits are guiding your life doesn’t mean that literally everything in your life is your ‘fault’ or the result of your habits because life isn’t quite that hat simple and things ‘happen’ all the time that are outside of your control like pure randomness, unexpected circumstance, other people and their quirks, or what some might call fate.
Here’s the key to growing real, though:
Even when you can’t control what happens, you can still control how you habitually respond to what happens.
Over time, your responses shape your experience of life just as much – if not more – than the events themselves.
What this means is that, no, it’s not 100% on you but the majority of your lived experience is being shaped by your habits every single day.
(No pressure!)
The Hidden Depth of Habit
When people think about habits, they usually think in terms of simple behaviours that will get specific results.
For example:
- “I should wake up earlier”.
- “I need to exercise more”.
- “I should stop eating rubbish”.
Whilst it’s true that these kind of things definitely matter, they’re actually just the tip of the ice berg, because the deeper truth is that:
Your life is not shaped by what you do occasionally – it’s shaped by what you do automatically.
This is really important to know because what you do automatically is governed by your conditioning and that conditioning shows up in three powerful and often overlooked domains:
- Your identity (ego).
- Your emotional patterns.
- Your thinking patterns.
If you don’t become aware of these, you don’t choose a life that’s actually REAL but repeat a life that’s a condition of being unreal when you don’t need to be.
Resistance vs Realness
If your present-day life doesn’t feel like one you’d genuinely love to be living, then something deeper is going on than just “bad luck” or “not trying hard enough”.
What’s really happening is this:
You’re not going deeply enough into life to build flow and momentum and the reason you’re not going deep enough is because your habits are pulling you into resistance.
Resistance shows up as various things but most commonly things like:
- Avoiding uncomfortable emotions.
- Overthinking instead of acting.
- Clinging to old identities.
- Seeking distraction instead of presence.
- Performing instead of being real.
Over time, this creates fragmentation which just means that you become split inside yourself between who you are, who you think you should be, and how you actually live.
Realness, on the other hand, is about integration and integration requires different habits.
Let’s take a quick look at what they are:
The Three Levels of Real Habits: Body, Mind, & Vision
If you want to start shifting your life in a meaningful way, then you need to build habits that move you towards wholeness rather than fragmentation.
Normally when I’m working with people, this happens across three main levels:
1. Body: Regulate and Release
Your body holds onto everything you don’t process and so things like stress, fear, shame, and anger don’t just disappear if they don’t get felt and integrated – they get stored.
This leads to a dysregulated nervous system, which then shapes your perception of reality and causes you to ultimately become more reactive, more anxious, and more closed to life (because a dysregulated nervous system sees ‘threat’s everywhere instead of being able to feel safe).
Real habits at the level of the body include:
- Breathing practices that calm the nervous system.
- Movement that releases tension (walking, training, stretching, or yin yoga).
- Allowing emotions to be felt instead of suppressed.
- Slowing down enough to actually notice what’s going on inside you.
When your body is regulated, you naturally become more open to life.
2. Mind: Detach and Choose
Most people are not thinking in a conscious way but being used by their thoughts in an unconscious way.
What this means is that they treat every thought as if it’s true, important, or worth reacting to but this is unreal because thoughts are just mental events – not actual reality itself.
If you don’t develop the habit of stepping back from them, they will run your life.
Real habits at the level of the mind include:
- Observing your thoughts instead of identifying with them.
- Questioning whether a thought is actually useful or real.
- Letting go of narratives that keep you stuck.
- Choosing actions based on your vision, not your mood.
When you realise that thoughts are something you have, not something you are, you regain agency and can actually start to live your real life again.
3. Vision: Act and Build
Awareness and acceptance of whether or not you’re being real or unreal is a good start but to start making an actual difference in your life you also need direction because without a vision, you drift, and drifting is just another form of unconscious habit.
Real habits at the level of vision include:
- Taking daily action towards something meaningful.
- Developing skills that align with who you want to become.
- Showing up consistently, even when it’s uncomfortable.
- Building momentum through small, repeated wins.
When your actions align with a real vision, your life starts to compound and flow in a powerful way.
The Less Obvious Habits That Change Everything
Beyond the three levels, there are deeper habitual patterns that often go unnoticed but all of which have a massive impact on our lives:
Habits of Ego (Identity)
Your ego is not just “who you are” in truth – it’s just a habitual way of identifying based on whatever you needed to survive in the past.
Because it’s so familiar, it feels real but it actually isn’t…this is good news because it means you can upgrade it based on where you’re trying to get in life and who you need to become to step into your REALNESS.
For example:
If your ego/identity is built around limitation (“I’m not good enough”, “I’m always unlucky”, “I’m the kind of person who struggles”, etc. etc. ), then your life will reflect that and it becomes a self-fulfilling loop (because your self-image is a self-fulfilling prophecy).
To break the loop, you need to shift from identifying with fixed ideas about yourself to identifying with flow and growth.
Realness in this context means that:
- You’re not a fixed concept but a living experience.
- You’re something that’s constantly unfolding, not ‘finished’.
- You can meet life as it is – not just as your past has conditioned you to see it
Habits of Emotion
One of the biggest blocks to realness is how people deal with emotions and the most common pattern is resistance or avoidance which can show up as suppressing, distracting, numbing out, or rationalising reality away.
This might work in the short term, but over time it creates disconnection and so you stop being present, start performing, and lose touch with what’s actually real.
The alternative is integration which means facing emotions head on and learning from them.
Real emotional habits for integration look like:
- Feeling emotions fully without being overwhelmed by them.
- Allowing them to move through you instead of getting stuck (emotions are e-motion, energy in motion).
- Using the energy of emotion to take meaningful action by transmuting them into purpose.
Emotion is not the enemy – resistance is.
Habits of Thought
If you’re not conscious of your thinking, your thoughts will control you.
This is unfortunate because many people live as if every thought is important even though this actually isn’t the case.
Most of our thoughts throughout the day are:
- Conditioned
- Repetitive
- Fear-based
- Completely disconnected from reality
The way forward is to understand that realness comes from creating space between you and your thoughts because this allows you to realise that you have a CHOICE.
You don’t have to follow every impulse, every fear, or every narrative – instead, you can step back and ask:
“What would the real version of me do here?”
Then you can do that!
Reverse Engineering Your Life to Get Out of the Habit Loop
If you’re not getting the results you want, there’s a strong chance you’re giving into a habit loop that doesn’t serve you.
The tricky part here is that many of these habits are unconscious and so it can be difficult to see them.
Thankfully, we can train ourselves to REVERSE ENGINEER them based on the results that we’re currently getting but don’t want.
You can start to do this by looking at your life as it is right now:
- Your relationships
- Your work
- Your energy levels
- Your emotional state
- Your sense of meaning
None of these things are ‘random’ – they’re patterns and patterns come from habits.
If you follow the thread backwards, you can start to see:
- How you habitually respond to stress.
- How you habitually think about yourself.
- How you habitually avoid or engage with life.
This is where change begins – not with forcing new behaviours on top of old patterns but with seeing clearly what’s already there and then making a CHOICE about what to do with it.
Check out my book Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness if you want to go deeper into being real and living a conscious life.
From Resistance to Realness: Practical Steps for Changing the Habit Loop
Understanding all of this is one thing but living it is another so here’s a few quick things you can do to start making this all practical:
1. Audit Your Reality
Take an honest look at your life and look at where you’re consistently getting results you don’t like or want.
Instead of blaming circumstances, ask yourself:
- “What habits might be creating this?”
- “How am I consistently showing up here?”
Be ruthless but fair with yourself so you can start to cultivate AWARENESS.
2. Identify the Pattern Beneath the Pattern
Go deeper than surface-level behaviour by asking yourself:
- What identity am I reinforcing?
- What emotions am I avoiding?
- What thoughts am I believing without question?
This is where the real leverage for change is because you’re getting into that deeper ‘stuff’.
3. Replace, Don’t Just Remove
You can’t just stop a habit – you need to replace it with something more conscious and REAL.
If your habit is to:
- Avoid → practise staying present.
- Overthink → take action.
- Suppress → express.
Make the new habit specific, actionable, and aligned with who you know you can BECOME.
4. Work Across All Three Levels
Don’t just focus on one area aim to do something every day that supports:
- Body (regulation and release)
- Mind (awareness and detachment)
- Vision (action and growth)
Small actions compound massively over time and so this where you will usually get the biggest results in the long-run.
5. Build Tolerance for Discomfort
Growth feels uncomfortable but that’s not a problem – it’s actually the point.
If you can learn to stay with discomfort instead of escaping it, you break the cycle of resistance and that’s where real change happens.
What this means is that you want to feel like you’re STRETCHING yourself a little further each day (but not so much that you start to panic).
6. Act From Who You’re Becoming
Instead of asking something like “What do I feel like doing?”, start asking something like “What would the real version of me do?”
Then do that even if it feels unnatural at first (especially then because it means you’re going against those old and outdated unconscious habits).
The Habit Loop: You Are What You Repeat
Your life is not defined by your intentions but by your repetitions.
Every day, in small and subtle ways, you are either reinforcing fragmentation or moving towards wholeness which means that you’re either choosing resistance or choosing realness.
The ‘good’ news is that because your life is shaped by habits, it is also changeable through habits and so – if you start to bring awareness to your patterns, if you start to shift how you relate to your body, your mind, and your actions – then over time, your life will begin to reflect that.
You don’t get a real life by accident – you build it, one real habit at a time.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to start acting like the real version of yourself and building a sense of flow and purpose in your life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you shift gear.
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