Everything journey towards achieving a goal involves learning new habits; No matter whether that is getting rid of bad habits, or obtaining good habits.
Success is a product of daily habits - not once-in-a-lifetime transformations
James Clear
Obtaining good habits and fighting of bad habits is an uphill battle. Humans want to conserve energy and thus prefer not to do a workout. Humans want to obtain food and thus choose to keep eating. Humans want to find love and reproduce, and thus watch porn. Humans want to connect and bond with others and thus use doom scroll on Instagram.
So we need to use our frontal cortex, the part of the brain that can override impulsive behavior, and build good habits instead. This blog describes some practical tips what you can do, to improve your control over your habits which then also increases your chance of reaching your long term goals.
Creating new habits
Learning a new habit takes time. Or better yet, it takes repetitions. How many repetitions it will take can vary a lot. A study where people were learning the habit to go for a walk after dinner, took people 18 to 254 days. It is also hard to measure if a new habit really has become a habit. The goal is that the new behavior costs very little friction to execute it. Now let’s get into how we can reduce this friction the most and increase our chances of forming the habit.
Don’t be vague about the formation
Just like when setting long term goals, it is important to be clear what you’re going to achieve. Instead of “get in shape”, you should at least mention the time and place too like “I am going to workout every morning at the local gym”. You can use the following framework as a guideline to describe your new habit more clearly:
“I will [behavior] at [time] in [this location]”
Make it rewarding
When we expect to be rewarded, we take action. The more rewarding an action is, the more likely we are to repeat it until it becomes a habit. The anticipation towards are reward and gaining the reward itself, releases a bit of dopamine in our system. This dopamine gives us a feeling of motivation. Rewarding yourself can be as small as ticking off a task in a habit tracker or to-do list.
Change your mindset
It can happen that you still have a negative association with the habit. A fitness should not be associated with being fatigued and muscle pains, instead it should be associated with having a healthy lifestyle and a higher well being. Cleaning the house shouldn’t be associated with wasting time, but instead it should be associated with having peace of mind and hygiene. Saving money shouldn’t be associated with sacrifices, but instead with the future financial freedom that will be gained.
Do you have negative associations with your habit? Affirmations in Strive Journal can help you to change your belief system. Read more about this in the blog about affirmations
Bundle temptation
Combining something that you need to do with something that you want to do, makes doing the thing you need to do a lot easier. For example, the easy habit of watching a movie can be combined with doing stretching exercises. Even if you’re not looking forward to doing some exercise, you’ll become conditioned to do it because you get to do something else you enjoy.
Chain habits
Chaining a habit is to do one habit after another. For example, after brushing your teeth, read a book for 15 minutes. In this example reading a book is the new exercise you want to learn. By doing it always after brushing your teeth, then brushing your teeth will become the trigger for reading.
Chaining habits also ties in with the philosophy of “One space, one use”. To use your sofa only for relaxation, your office chair only for work, a pillow at the window only for reading. When you’re in that space, then it will trigger doing a certain habit.
Group influence
Being held accountable by a partner is a good way to keep your desired habits in check. We all want to be liked and respected, so we would rather just avoid the punishment. For example, I owe you $10 every time I miss a workout, plus the respect I lose for failing to do what I said I would. Behavior is more likely to be influenced by concrete, and immediate consequences.
Breaking a bad habit
Creating new habits is one, but getting rid of bad habits is another…
Awareness
Most of your current habits are so automatic that you don’t even realize them. You must first become aware of your habits before you can change them. A way to do this is to write down everything you do during a day and identify the bad habits from that.
What you do after a bad habit matters
If you’re trying to focus on work, but you fall into a bad behavior like checking social media and thus losing your focus. Instead of going back to work, you should do something else which you associate with a good habit like drinking water for example. Because otherwise, you would make associations between working and social media which never helps you to get rid of the habit. If you would drink water (good habit) after check social media (bad habit), then you would make associations between work and drinking water, and the bad habit eventually won’t be in between anymore.
Make it unattractive or harder
Find ways to create barriers of friction between yourself and the bad habit. Make it as impractical as possible. Do anything you can to make your bad habits less likely to occur. Here are a few examples of common bad habits and how to make it harder or unattractive;
- If you want to watch less TV, unplug the TV after each use and put the remote in an inconvenient location.
- Put junk food out of sight or remove it from your house if you are trying to lose weight.
- Remove Social Media apps from your phone and only access them through the browser
- Block access to Video websites on your computer and only allow to watch it from your phone
- Leave your cigarettes always on the attic
Don’t break the chain of continuity
Are you familiar with apps in which you can have a daily streak? For example with language learning apps, games, and habit trackers. Those streaks are very powerful because once you break this chain of continuity, you are very likely to stop doing it. On a bad day it’s better to do 10 sit ups (instead of your normal 50) than to not do them at all.
Use a habit tracker like HabitNow and not Strive Journal. Habit trackers are specialized in habits, while Strive Journal focuses more on the long term goals; the result that comes after you’ve built new habits
Source: Atomic Habits by James Clear The Science of Making & Breaking Habits by The Huberman Lab Podcast