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How to Build Healthy Habits
Habit matching
When planning on building new habits, one easy way to integrate them into your everyday routine is by actually adding them to an already existing habit.
Therefore, choose one habit you have had for quite a while now and associate a new routine to it. You might be surprised by how fast you will get used to doing both at the same time, without feeling the most recent one as a burden.
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Habit matching
When planning on building new habits, one easy way to integrate them into your everyday routine is by actually adding them to an already existing habit.
Therefore, choose one habit you have had for quite a while now and associate a new routine to it. You might be surprised by how fast you will get used to doing both at the same time, without feeling the most recent one as a burden.
A step at a time
Once you have made up your mind about taking on a new habit, you might as well start getting used to it. Just remember that we have, as humans, the tendency to work better without pressure and when taking one step at a time.
Therefore, start by creating small habits and get used to them and you will see how easy it is to build long-lasting routines that will make your life easier.
Practice makes perfect
When having taken the decision to introduce in your routine a new habit, it is very important to remember that practice makes perfect. Consequently, wait no more and start doing even if just a bit every day. You will eventually succeed in adding a new habit while feeling proud of yourself for being consistent.
Ease your routine
According to researchers, individuals find it easier to stick to a habit as long as they have the impression that this is easy to do.
Therefore, one should try to simplify as much as possible the practice of his or her habit by thinking of ways to do it faster or more interesting.
Rewarding is worth gold
As in any other field in life, when you take up a new habit, you should make sure that, once you have successfully integrated it into your routine, you get the chance to be rewarded in any way you like. Associating your success with a favorite moment can prove both time-saving and satisfactory.
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Develop better habits by:
- Thinking really small: it accumulates and adds up in a big way;
- Shifting your evironment, so that good habits are easier to keep;
- Piggybacking new habits on old habits:
- Surrounding yourself with good people:
- Keeping it simple: short lists, reachable;
- Picking yourself up when you fall.
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How To Choose Good Habits
- Envision your ideal end result. What are you going to achieve?
- Write it down. It will serve as a powerful motivation, especially if you include why you want it.
Good Habits For Health and Fitness
- Regular Aerobic Exercise: Great for both your physical and mental health. Increases the production of dopamine and boosts creativity.
- Preparing Your Own Meals. It’ll take some getting used to, but it’s a habit that’ll boost your health, wealth and productivity.
Good Habits For Finance and Wealth
- Create a Household Budget: the best habit to help you save money. A household budget helps to encourage frugality and discourage impulse spending. You’ll feel more motivated to engage in other good financial habits once you’ve got this in place.
- Financial Audits. This involves frequent checks as to whether you’re spending your money as wisely as possible.
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Willpower is Limited
Though companies like Nike try to ignite our willpower with their slogans, ultimately willpower cannot squash our subconscious and unconscious behavior.
Repetition of action and thought can m...
Knowledge is not Enough
If you know that you will eat junk food because your refrigerator is filled with it, remove all the junk food.
Friction
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.
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Struggling To Build Healthy Habits
- We tend to bite off more than we can chew, go too fast too soon, and then get overwhelmed too quickly.
- We’re conditioned these days to expect and receive instant gratification.
Your “Big Why”
As you’re determining the habits or resolutions you’re trying to set, make the habit part of a bigger cause that’s worth the struggle.
You’re not just going to the gym, you’re building a new body that you’re not ashamed of so you can start dating again.
Healthy Habit Building 101
There are 3 parts to a good or bad habit: Cue (what triggers the action), Routine (the action itself), Reward (the positive result because of the action).
You have trained your brain to take a cue (you see a doughnut), anticipate a reward (a sugar high), and make the behavior automatic (nom that donut).Compare that to a cue (you see your running shoes), anticipate a reward (a runner’s high), and make the behavior automatic (go for a run!).
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Resolutions Don't Work
Resolutions feel huge, requiring a lot of mental bandwidth and loads of constant motivation to keep up. Resolutions are easy to decide on but tough to maintain daily.
Habits...
Habits: Start Small
Start small with something you already desire or like to do, to ease out the entire process for you right at the start.
For example, if you plan to write more, why not buy a journal and a pen that you want to use, and keep them handy, facilitating the writing habit naturally.
Trigger New Action
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Habits Are Not Blind Routines
Conventional wisdom states that strong habits improve our productivity. Daily habits done in an autopilot mode are not the only route to peak performance.
While our habits help us stick to g...
Revisit What You Do Daily
Some of our daily to-dos should not require a constant daily effort and could be optimized further. Look for such habits and if the daily effort is straining you, look for other innovative solutions.
Time and Energy are limited resources, and as we grow, our habits may become obsolete. We could use the same time and energy to explore new and better options.
It is a good idea to pay attention to where we spend our time and see if there is something we do daily but have outgrown long ago.
Consistency and Boredom
Being consistent can also lead to burnout and lack of growth, and to be creative and innovative, we sometimes need a break from our daily activity. When we stop and do something new, we start to be part of a creative process, instead of simply repeating the same thing every day.
The key is to not rely on a rigid consistency but to be resilient enough to withstand any breaks. Our resilient habits are usually the old ones and have some psychological rewards while involving some external accountability.
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How to Develop Habits
- Focus on just one habit, for 30 days.
- Put it on paper, together with your motivations, obstacles, and strategies for overcoming them.
- Commit fully, pr...
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Habits and behavior change
Habits are a type of learning
They generate an impulse to do a behavior with little or no conscious thought.
By forming a habit, the brain frees the mind to do other things without deliberation. So behaviors that require concentration, deliberation, or extended effort, are not habits.
What drives motivation
Motivation is not driven by pleasure and pain, but rather by the desire to escape discomfort.
Our brains get our bodies to do what they want through discomfort. And the same rule applies to psychological discomfort.
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B. J. Fogg
Starting good habits and sticking to them
- Harness the dopamine effect: identify the desired outcome. Mentally walking yourself through the process of success and the joys and benefits it brings can teach your brain to be motivated by something other than dread.
- Start with baby-steps: identify the “tiny habits” behaviors — we should start with small actions that we can celebrate.
- Use triggers: these new habits follow other routines that are already ingrained into your daily life(triggers), so every time you complete this already existing behavior, there will be a trigger, or an automatic reminder, in your brain to do the new one.
- Let it snowball.
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Default choices
90% of your daily decisions happen automatically, many shaped by your environment. Thus, most decisions are a habit, not a deliberate choice.
To make smarter choices, design smarter...
Designing your life
Design your life like a choice architect:
- Encourage smarter decisions you want to do by making them more accessible.
- Add friction to habits you want to quit, making them less accessible, or remove the option to perform them completely.
Richard Thaler
“First, never underestimate the power of inertia. Second, that power can be harnessed.”
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