The Beauty of Habits

How Learning Positive and Healthy Habits Can Change Your Life // Book Talk of Atomic Habits

For todays topic, I’m going to go into a bit about habits and why it’s so important to have good, healthy, and productive ideas implemented in your life. I am also going to be using the information I learned and gathered from a recent book I read: Atomic Habits by James Clear. The whole book is about developing better habits, making small changes, and making them stick. So, let’s dive right into it.

How to Start Making New Habits

With anything in life, starting is the hardest part of anything. Once you start to get going, things starts to come to you more and more just like a habit. But, having that cue to start is the start with a new habit. Everyday we wake up in the morning. We might make our bed, brush our teeth, and eat breakfast. We do that every morning without fail, no questions asked. These little things are habits for us to do. Now let’s say you wanted to start taking walks every morning too, how could you implement that?

The beginning phase of starting a new habit is first the cue as Clear states in the book. You need to have a thought or reason that makes you want to start a new habit, and in this case, it’s wanting to walk more to exercise, that’s our cue. A great method to start with is writing it down on paper. According to Wield on Winning’s Blog, studies show that when you write something down, you’re 62% more likely to accomplish whatever goals you’re trying to accomplish. For example, for this scenario we’d write down something such as, “After I wake up and brush my teeth, I will walk 1 mile around my neighborhood.” By doing this, it gives you of a commitment to yourself by writing it down and seeing it in front of you.

Although for some, 1 mile or 10 minutes could be more than someone may want to do when starting a new habit. To make this easier and helpful for the long term, it’s good to simply start super small and build up from there. Think of it as instead of making yourself a habit to walk every morning, make it a habit to just get your shoes on in the morning. By doing this, you’re enabling that cue in your brain to go outside and take a walk once you have your shoes on. So, after a little practice of just putting your shoes on and going outside for any amount of minutes, you’ll start to associate putting on your shoes in the morning with taking a walk. From this, a simple cue turns into a craving. As Clear says, ‘you want to make the habit obvious for yourself and make it very easy for yourself to start’, just as easy as just putting on your shoes in the morning.

The 2 Minute Law

Another idea that was mentioned in Atomic Habits that you can use is the 2 Minute Law. The 2 Minute Law states that "when you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.” To apply this to our previous example; go outside and walk around for 2 minutes and then come back inside or stop whatever you’re doing immediately. Make that habit of simply putting your shoes on and then walk around for 2 minutes outside. Eventually doing this will become second-nature with enough practice, and it will start to become more and more normal for you to do it every morning.

How to Avoid Bad Habits and Make Good Ones Inevitable

It’s hard to avoid our bad habits because most of them goes along the lines of feeling “pleasure” in the moment, or simply an immediate reward for ourselves. Sex and overeating are two very common example of this because they give us an reward immediately, but don’t help much for the long term. We, as humans, are just naturally impatient. We don’t want to wait for a reward, we want it right now, and that’s the cause of most bad habits. From vaping, you let your anxiety settle in the moment, from sex you get pleasure, from overeating you feel good and satisfied in the moment. After you perform the bad habits is when you feel like crap though. When developing good habits such as exercising, it’s uncomfortable and physically tiring, which is why many try to skip it because it’s a lot of work. Again, why bad habits are more common, there’s no waiting to wait that 5 lbs when you get the pleasure and satisfaction immediately. As Clear says, “As a rule, the more immediate pleasure you get from an action, the more strongly you should question weather it aligns with your long term goals.” Okay, so now how can we avoid these habits and make it inevitable to make good ones for ourselves?

Well, the first huge thing with making better habits inevitable is the environment around us. If the environment around us makes bad habits too obvious, we’re more likely to fall right into them. For example, if you have ice cream and cookies within reach to find, you’re more likely to overeat because they’re in the environment. The solution: remove them or have someone hide them for you. By doing this, you’re making it so the environment around you isn’t making it easy to fall into bad habits of eating a lot of calories and sugar at once. If you don’t have anyway to get it where you are, it’s impossible to do it. Just like drugs, if you don’t put yourself into an environment with weed or other kinds of drugs, you’re way less likely to actually do them.

Lastly, a great way to make good habits inevitable is by making a commitment device. The definition of a commitment device is a choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future - a way to lock in future behavior and bind you to better habits for yourself. For example, your usage of social media. If you’re somebody who is constantly scrolling and scrolling until late hours, you can do a lot of different things to make it so you don’t as much, and make getting sleep a priority. Two things that I have done for myself personally is 1. Have an alert to put my phone down at 9-10 p.m. every night and 2. Put it in a drawer until I have done the task I am working on. From doing this, you’re both limiting your usage and making it so it’s not as tempting to keep using your phone while there’s other tasks to be done.

How Can I Stick With My New Habits?

One good way to stick to your habits is to keep yourself accountable in some way. You can use a “Star on the calendar” method like we did when we were kids even. It was so effective because it was a little reward that gave us satisfaction. We like to know we’re accomplishing something even if it’s something small like just putting a star on the calendar for the day for doing the right habits. By doing this, you’re not only keeping track of yourself and your habits, but you’re also motivating yourself to keep going and staying consistent. A system mentioned in the novel was using paper clips, let’s say a 100 of them. Every time you’d have a day where you performed your new habit, you’d put the paper clip into a cup, and do this until you run out. The outcome of this is both keeping yourself satisfied everyday and being able to become more and more consistent.

Another method you could do as well is make yourself a simple rewards system for your habit. For example, “After I walk, I will have a little cup of popcorn. After I eat my popcorn, I will clean my room.” Here, we’re giving ourselves a little reward for performing our habit, and stacking another habit on top after our reward to initiate the next task on the list of our things to do, which is also known as habit stacking. From habit stacking, it triggers your brain to start wanting to do productive habits more in hopes that you look forward to performing them and wanting to accomplish them more often.

Outro

To wrap up today’s blog, I challenge any of you reading today to challenge yourself to make a new habit! It can be anything as small as taking a walk once a week or trying to limit you screen time after a certain time in the evening. You can do it as long as you put your mind to it and stick with it! The results will come progressively.

Performing healthy and productive habits for yourself are one of the many essentials to living your best life and becoming a version of yourself that you may not even had known was possible. With certain habits, they’re such little tiny things that have a huge impact in our lives, that when we start them, it’s a game changer.

Make sure to check out James Clear’s Atomic Habits!

Thanks for reading 😼

-Brandon

Source(s): Wield on Winning’s Blog