Guitar Habits And Developing Routines

One question every guitar teacher hates is, “how long until I’m good at playing the guitar?” Giving a timeframe for learning the physical and mental complexities cannot be predicted more than when one might breathe their last breath. This holds true for learning a difficult piece like Recuerdos de la Alhambra or successfully landing a G chord at once. However, with certainty, I can say that the consistent development of the routine of practicing and habits while practicing decreases the timeframe. There are psychological and biological methodologies that we can use to our advantage when constructing these guitar habits.

Defining Habits In Guitar Habits

Let’s try to get clear on a couple of definitions. The first is the definition of a habit. Benjamin Gardner, a psychologist focusing on habit research at King’s College London, states that “Habit works by generating an impulse to do a behavior with little or no conscious thought.”^[1]https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/automatic-you/201601/is-how-make-yourself-do-what-you-need-do This is what we are working towards when we are trying to play a piece fluidly. In fact, there are many habits working at once during this type of activity.

What about the habit of sitting down to actually practice? Do you do this without any conscious thought? Your answer is probably, no. This is because it is really a routine and not a habit. Can practicing the guitar be a habit? I’m sure it could, but it isn’t a good candidate for the psychological definition of habit.

Building Guitar Habits Routine With MEA

For those that struggle with being consistent with a daily practice routine, then let me suggest a method by Nir Eyal called the MEA or minimum enjoyable action^[2]https://www.nirandfar.com/your-new-years-resolution-is-bound-to/. Here’s how it works. Whatever routine you are trying to create, first find the MEA and do it. Let’s take the example given by Eyal, flossing. You desire to improve your dental health but forget or don’t really like flossing but know you need to. Well, floss one tooth. On the next day, floss another tooth. Stay with one until you feel like, “hey, I can do two tonight.” And you can see how this will work as you move forward. However, the other part of this is to track your flossing until it becomes routine.

When beginning anything new on the guitar, I have often found myself not wanting to practice. This is especially true when I have decided to learn a new piece. It always seems daunting. For a new guitarist, it might be trying to get the fingers in the shape of a G chord. In my case, can I just play the first measure? Often, just this is enough to set me on the path of a strong session that can lead to a good routine. For the student just learning a G chord, can you place just a single finger down easily? Each time you decide to practice, the routine begins to take shape.

Building Guitar Habits Routine With Loss

Another method is loss as a motivator. Social science tells us that the psychological pain of loss is twice as powerful as the joy of gain. I don’t like this method overall, but for those that make excuses for not practicing even though they really want to improve on the guitar, it may help.

Here’s how it works. Set up a calendar next to where you practice. Then, tape a $100 bill next to it. Decide your weekly practice schedule and mark it on the calendar. When the day comes, you have two choices. A) Get your practice done or B) burn the $100 bill. You cannot give it away or buy something else with it. You actually have to burn it. I am aware that it is illegal to burn legal tender. This should further encourage your practice routine. This technique had a great effect on smokers that had to risk their own money in a study from the New England Journal of Medicine.^[3]https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1414293 Ultimately, it doesn’t have to be a $100 bill. It just needs to be a form of loss that hurts in some way (obviously, not physically).

I sure hope that practicing guitar does not require this sort of effort for most people. The idea is to confront the things that prevent us from doing what we are not doing to doing what we want to do to develop a routine of practicing the guitar.

21 Days For Habits To Take Hold?

But now I’d like to look at habits and not routines. As guitarists, we are forming habits in every song, scale, chord, etc. The strum of the pick, the firing of a rest stroke, or the shift of the left hand up the neck illustrate the types of habits that formed during guitar playing. But how long does it take to form a habit?

It’s 21 days, right? Not so fast. The idea of the 21 days that have become embedded in our collective conscience goes back to the 1950s and a plastic surgeon named Maxwell Maltz. He noticed that it took his patients 21 days to get used to seeing their new faces after surgery. He noticed the same for patients that had to have a limb amputated. It took about 21 days for them to not feel the phantom limb that no longer existed. He noticed other correlating phenomena and published his thoughts in the book Psycho-Cybernetics.^[4]https://jamesclear.com/new-habit

A Real Timeframe For Habits

But the problem was that it was only his observations and not a controlled peer-reviewed study. But that didn’t stop the self-help world from eating up this idea and making it commonplace. As Dr. Michael Greger says, “You don’t know until you put it to the test.” And, that’s what Phillippa Lally, a health psychology researcher at University College London decided to do.

The study looked “to investigate the process of habit formation in everyday life, 96 volunteers chose an eating, drinking or activity behavior to carry out daily in the same context (for example ‘after breakfast’) for 12 weeks.” What were the results? Results “ranged from 18 to 254 days; indicating considerable variation in how long it takes people to reach their limit of automaticity and highlighting that it can take a very long time.”^[5]https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ejsp.674

We often think that creating the guitar habits to play tremolo or cross-picking will take a much shorter time than it actually does. Yes, the study above was the formation of a different type of habit than habits involved in playing the guitar, but habits nonetheless. Reading between the lines, habits are also dependent on many other factors. Genes, circumstances, time previously spent, etc. are all different for every individual. Is there anything outside of our differences that can aid in the development of habit formation?

Habits are not reflexes. Reflexes are “an action or movement of the body that happens automatically, or without thinking, as a reaction to something.”^[6]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4540252/ Further, the idea of reflexes involves something innate or already present in the body. What we are trying to develop when it comes to habits is making an action reflexive. This requires a trigger and then proceeds to develop into automaticity. One exists without our foreknowledge the other does not.

It is estimated that around “43% of everyday actions are enacted habitually while people are thinking about something else (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 83, No. 6, 2002).”^[7]https://www.apa.org/monitor/2020/11/career-lab-habits To my understanding, there are differences in the definitions of habits when speaking psychologically and neurologically. Neurologically goal-based habits like working out or practicing 50 minutes a day are akin to developing a routine as discussed above. Identity-based habits of getting fit or becoming a better guitarist over time are slightly different. Identity-based habits include goal-based habits in order to create a successful habit.

As guitarists, we are also looking at, not only, the macro-level habits, but also the micro-level habits. These include every habit needed to execute any movement on the guitar (micro) as well as the habit to practice on a regular basis (macro). There are also other habits formed in the order of our thinking process to the way we sit.

The question we must ask ourselves is how we develop these habits effectively. In doing so, is there a way to increase our automaticity in playing the guitar?

Visualization To Develop Guitar Habits

One of the most effective ways to begin the foundation for forming new habits is through visualization. This concept is not new to most guitarists. It can be used to build up the routine habit and the habit of playing a specific piece. A routine habit can be strengthened by visualizing the steps you will take to begin and end your practice sessions. What does the room look like? Does the light look different at that time of day in the room? What does the chair feel like when you are sitting in it? How does the guitar feel and sound? What does it feel like when you finish a practice session successfully? Visualizing these types of things the night before your practice will greatly increase the likelihood of having the practice session the following day.

Visualization can also be used to develop guitar habits in the memorization of a piece. It is well known that this technique is used by the majority if not all, high-level guitarists. The goal is to see every note and fingering used from the beginning of the piece to the end. It may also include hearing internally the piece.

Beyond memory, visualization can develop the habits involved in sitting correctly and finger movement. Visualizing how the finger exits the strings. What does the hand look like when cross-picking or strumming? This has a unique effect on the plasticity of the brain when acquiring these skills.

Phases Of The Day To Develop Guitar Habits

Now, we get to one of my favorite topics that Dr. Andrew Huberman calls “Task Bracketing”.^[8]https://hubermanlab.com/the-science-of-making-and-breaking-habits/ It is the science behind when the brain is most “ready” to form a habit and build brain plasticity. From the onset, let’s be clear that what we are talking about below does not refer to a specific time every day, but a time window. Time-specific scheduling has been shown to help habits in the short term but not so much in the long term. I will be applying Huberman’s phases concept to learning the guitar.

First, we must discuss an idea Huberman calls “Limbic Friction.” I will give you my best explanation of this idea. Whenever we attempt to learn something new, there is limbic friction. This is what we need to overcome in order to effectively form the new neurological connections and firings of synapses to create a new habit. It’s that feeling when you sit down, begin working on a new piece of music, and it feels like your brain is straining. That is my best description of limbic friction.

It turns out that we biologically have specific times of day that make it easier to push through this limbic friction in different ways. Using Huberman’s modeling, three phases in each day complete this process. Phase 1 lasts from waking to 8 hours plus or minus 30 minutes. Next, Phase 2 lasts from 9 to 15 hours plus or minus 30 minutes. Finally, Phase 3 lasts from 16 to 24 hours after waking to the start of the repeating cycle.

Phase 1 offers the opportunity to get the hard work done and push more easily through limbic friction. This is the time of day that the body and mind are primed to work on difficult tasks. It is also why psychologists suggest working on the things you don’t really want to do first thing in the morning.^[9]https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/easy-or-hard-tasks-first If you are learning a new piece or scale fingering. If you are struggling to execute a new chord progression and the hand movements or struggle with hearing a melody by ear, then you need to put this work within the first eight hours of waking. Biologically you will be more successful at pushing through the limbic friction to create the new habits needed to complete and learn these challenges. You will be building the plasticity of the brain in order to create automaticity with these habits.

Let’s take a short detour to talk about automaticity. The APA Dictionary of Psychology defines automaticity as “the quality of a behavior or mental process that can be carried out rapidly and without effort or explicit intention (an automatic process).”^[10]https://dictionary.apa.org/automaticity In learning the guitar, our lives are driven by the desire to create automaticity in almost every area of playing. The most common association is with motor, or muscle, memory. When playing a piece up to tempo and fluidly, I am not directing every single movement of my fingers at the moment. It is the automaticity that I have developed over time that allows me to do so. And, automaticity is the development of habit. Further, playing an instrument is a habit, on top of habit, on top of habit.

When a habit becomes automatic, it takes less mental effort to complete it. That’s why when I read through a set of chord changes that I have played for years I don’t even look at my hands and can play at the tempo of the song. This is even for songs that I have never heard before. But when a new guitarist attempts to play the same chords, they exert an enormous amount of energy to find and play the same chords. This is limbic friction. As guitar habits become automatic, more energy can be devoted to other areas of a song or piece.

This brings us to Phase 2 of the day. In this phase of the day, serotonin levels rise to lead to a more relaxed state of being.^[11]https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/22572-serotonin At this time of day our ability to push through limbic friction decreases. For guitarists, it’s a good time for reviewing information that has begun to be automatic. Playing scales and arpeggios that are in the system but need work. Playing through and working on pieces and songs that are memorized and/or learned to the point that repetition isn’t mentally taxing. Or maybe you decide to jam out over a backing track using the scales you improved during your morning session. Most importantly, remember that the acquisition of new material is not good during this time of day.

From a common sense view, this should be apparent to everyone. Who comes home from an eight-hour day of work and wants to jump into something that is mentally taxing? If that were the case, then Netflix and Amazon Prime Video would be out of business. What I am trying to get to is why it works this way and how you can decide to arrange your practice to make the best benefit of the biological and neurological functions in our body.

Phase 3 should not really have any practice at all. I know, I just offended half the listeners that say they work best at night. I wish I had reliable evidence on the percentage of the population that are actually night owls. However, every study I have seen on the subject does not rely on control trials of any sort. They are what I would classify as surveys that are notoriously filled with inaccuracies for various reasons.

Biologically, this is the time that the body is preparing for sleep and sleeping. The most critical form of sleep during this time is deep sleep. This deep sleep locks into the nervous system the stuff we pushed past limbic friction to build neuro-pathways and increase brain plasticity. It’s during this time that these memories in the hippocampus move into the neocortex making them reflexive (i.e. automatic). This is important because, after the migration, the habits formed during the morning sessions can now happen in the afternoon session. Think of memorizing a piece every morning until it is reflexive. Then, you can move it to the afternoon to further refine the habit. Phase 3 is probably the most important phase in the cycle but the least taken care of, not just for guitarists, but for society at large.

Most people never really take into account the biological mechanisms that allow for better learning. Learning must be seen as a whole process. However, reducing it to understand the best uses of the phases as a whole allows us to take advantage of the natural systems for learning.

Implementing these ideas into our schedules may not be easy. If you can build the routine of rising early and practicing before work, then start down that path. If that seems impossible for you, then think of days like Saturday or Sunday that may allow for more focused work in Phase 1. The rest of the week you might be spending more time reviewing and maturing work that you have already made reflexive. These ideas do not come naturally from the world we live in. However, they already exist biologically in each of us. They can help or hurt us depending on how we use the natural functions within.

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Chadwick Becks

I have two degrees in guitar performance and was privileged to study under Aaron Shearer, Tom Kikta, David Skantar, Ken Karsh, Tim Bedner, and currently Christopher Berg. Outside my editorial work on this blog, I teach full-time across many genres including classical, jazz, blues, rock, funk, and metal.