Starting vs breaking a habit

If you know that you will eat junk food because your refrigerator is filled with it, remove all the junk food.

Just as removing friction aids in doing the activity more often, adding friction can aid to remove the bad habit, by making it difficult or cumbersome to do so.

Example: Cigarette smoking declined due to adding taxes, banning in public places and removing from vending machines.

• Classical conditioning: a paired association with a trigger and a behavior. Going to the gym after you wake up each morning is this kind of habit.
• Operant conditioning: you not only associate a trigger with a behavior, but you reward that pairing, to accelerate the habit-forming process.

You commit to some change for 30 days, then tou can go back to your old ways. But having spent thirty days applying a new behavior is often enough to convince you to stick with it.

Pros:

• Can handle more significant/difficult behavior changes you might be unlikely to start with a perpetual commitment.
• Fosters an experimental mindset, rather than assuming you already know what’s best.

Cons:

• 30 days probably isn’t enough to actually make something a habit.
• Without a long-term plan, many 30-day trials will revert back to the original behavior.

Bad habits don’t go away overnight. But, you can use strategies to give you that extra boost of self-confidence and self-control required to change.

Understand that sometimes you will fail and sometimes you’ll succeed. But no matter how long it takes to fail and get back up again, your patience and perseverance will soon pay off.

It gives you an automatic response to react to your cravings and makes it easier to replace a bad habit with a good one: 

• Identify the scenario that usually triggers your bad habit.
• Specify a different response to the trigger. Ideally, this should be a good habit that would replace and prevent you from falling into the temptation.
• Combine steps 1 and 2 into an “if-then” format.

All of the habits that you have right now — good or bad — are in your life because they provide a benefit to you, even if they are bad for you in other ways.

And because bad habits provide some type of benefit in your life, it's very difficult to simply eliminate them. Instead, you need to replace a bad habit with a new habit that provides a similar benefit.

• Choose a substitute for your bad habit. 
• Cut out as many triggers as possible. 
• Surround yourself with people who live the way you want to live.
• Visualize yourself succeeding and avoid negative self-talk.
• Plan for failure and find things that can help you bounce back when you make a mistake.
  

Beans come in many varieties and are excellent stand-ins for meat in certain recipes.

Cooking the beans yourself provides a better flavor and texture, but canned beans are also a good alternative as convenience food.

Grains have more protein than we think and also contains a host of other vital nutrients, especially when we eat them whole.

Some staple that fills a grain bowl is quinoa, Kamut, teff, millet, wild rice, buckwheat, cornmeal, and even pasta.

Think of your life as a long sequence of actions and decisions.

Just ask yourself, “Is this a good thing to do?” If the answer is Yes, go do it.

It's up to you to define what a good habit is. This critical to forming new habits. 

To find your why, your reason to change, just ask yourself this: “Will habit x improve the quality of my life?”  Answer that. And then, adopt habits that bring you closer to the things you want in life.

We overestimate ourselves most of the time. And that's one of the reasons we try to do so many things at the same time, in a short period.

We can achieve a lot over a long period. So focus on one thing at a time. Stack one habit on top of the other, one by one.

Focus on baby steps. The key to new good habits is to do the minimum and be consistent.

Do not be ambitious at the beginning. That leads to failure. Consistency is what you’re shooting for, so make the hurdle as low as possible.

Thinking about the details makes you more likely to follow through. 

Just writing down your plan also makes a big difference in effectively committing to your goals.

A habit - a mini-system that once you create, becomes automatic to your body, with minimal interference from the brain.

The Habit Loop is a breakdown of a habit put it into three sections:

• Cue: A certain trigger that awakens the habit
• Routine: The action you perform without thinking.
• Reward: The change you experience making you want to do more of the same.

Keep a trigger cue ready and stack up the routine in such a way that your tasks become a habitual routine without any friction, each trigger cue and routine stacked over the next one.

Example: Put on running shoes instead of slippers in the morning and that's your cue to go out for a walk, then when you are back and feeling sweaty, that's your cue to take a bath.