Facts About Habits & Insights Curated from Trusted Sources

Every habit consists of four parts:

1. The cue (what triggers your desire to do something)
2. The craving (the desire for an action)
3. The response (the action)
4. The reward (the satisfaction you get from doing it)

To successfully build a good habit you need to use the four laws of habit building:

1. Make it obvious (Don't give your head time to reconsider. Make it obvious for yourself that the action is the right thing to do)
2. Make it attractive (Make ot clear for yourself why you want to do it. Understanding makes it far more attractive)
3. Make it easy (Just make it as easy as you can. Break your habit down in little and easy parts)
4. Make it satisfying (Give yourself a reward when you've done it)

• Nutrition: Use smaller plates to reduce caloric intake.
  
• Sleep: Remove your television from the bedroom.
  
• Productivity: Delete games and social media apps from the phone.
  
• Happiness: Get a dog.
  
• Finance: Call your service providers (cable, electric, etc.) and ask for a lower rate.
  

These one-time actions only require effort once.

Habits have a lot to do with a meaningful life. They change the trajectory of our lives. Good habits influence how we spend our short time and who we become. When we develop meaningful habits, our lives become more fulfilling.

We don’t consciously make decisions about which habits we adopt in life. Rather, most of them grow out of conscious decisions about how to respond in given situations. Often these small, almost invisible choices have huge consequences on our happiness.

• Refill your bucket on a regular basis. That means making time for sleep and recovery.
• Let the draining tasks in your life accumulate and drain your bucket. Once you hit empty, your body will force you to rest through injury and illness.

Habit stacking means that you take a habit you already have (like eating breakfast) and stack another habit on top of it. This may look like:

"I am going to read one chapter of my new book after eating breakfast"

Your character and personality is formed by every single action you take during the day. To improve your habits means that you in fact improve your character.

Your entire identity is the result of all your habits together.

Habits have an amazing power if applied right. They can be broken down into 3 parts :

THE CUE - Something that triggers your brain to go into HABIT MODE.

THE ROUTINE - Performing the action, the actual habit, that was previously triggered by the cue.

THE REWARD - The sense of accomplishment, I really small release of dopamine in your brain, and on you go.

If you take these 3 small steps into bigger things, they can really impact your professional and personal life.

• Goals are a one-time bargain. They are the spending mindset. 
  
• Habits are an investing mindset. Habits require one to invest one’s efforts for a little while and then take the rewards of that effort and re-invest them in a greater effort to form even better habits.
  

1. Use smaller plates. Bigger plates mean bigger portions.
2. Use tall, slender glasses instead of short, fat ones to drink less alcohol or soda.
3. Use plates that have a high contrast color with your food.
4. Display healthy foods in a prominent place.
5. Wrap unhealthy foods in tin foil and healthy foods in plastic wrap.
6. Keep healthy foods in larger packages and containers, and unhealthy foods in smaller ones.

According to the four laws of habit building you can do the exact opposite to break a bad habit. This results in the four laws of breaking a habit:

1. Make it invisible
2. Make it unattractive
3. Make it difficult
4. Make it less rewarding

If you build empowering habits, you'll no longer have to use you motivation and willpower to becme focused. your mind will recognize the pattern and will make your job easier. For example — when you wash your teeth and face in the morning, you’re doing automatically without using any significant amounts of focus, energy, and motivation. Building productive habits is like teaching your brain how to behave at different yet specific times.

Habits are programmed human behaviors with little or zero conscious thought. Habits free our minds to other things, but our behavior isn’t always on autopilot. There are many tasks that require concentration, deliberation, and effort, and cannot be simply fed in the brain as an automatic habit.

Behavior that requires conscious thought (like writing a journal every morning) is a routine, not a habit.

2 main ways you can condition a habit:

• 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.

1. Exercise: benefits for mental and physical health.

2. Cooking: benefits in controlling what and when you eat.

3. Meditation: increased focus, improved self-awareness, better mental health.

4.Reading: benefits in interpersonal relationships.

5. Writing: writing well is one of the most important life skills in the 21st century.

6. Socializing: being alone can be just as bad for your physical health as obesity or heavy smoking.

Talking about healthy decisions is easy to do, but implementing them is the challenge. One easy quick fix is to avoid unnecessary risks and instead focus on creating healthy habits.

A healthy lifestyle includes taking vitamins and medications as directed by your healthcare provider, using sunscreen daily, not smoking or quitting if you’ve started, and getting enough sleep.

1. Start with an incredibly small habit, one that is easy enough that you don't need motivation to do it
2. Increase your habit in very small ways - start small and gradually improve
3. As you build up, break habits into chunks
4. When you slip, get back on track quickly.

• Try to sleep for seven to nine hours a night.
• Keep consistent wake-up and bedtimes.
• Keep the bedroom cool, quiet and dark.
• Avoid alcohol, caffeine, and exercise before bed.
• Turn off your screens 30 to 60 minutes before you need to sleep.

People find their greatest enjoyment when they're fully absorbed in a mindful challenge, known as "flow".

How to get into flow:

• Find work that you're passionate about.
• Clear away distractions and focus entirely on the task.

• To draw more: Put your pencils, pens, notebooks, and drawing tools on top of your desk, within easy reach.
• To exercise more: Set out your workout clothes, shoes, gym bag, and water bottle ahead of time.
• To improve your diet: Chop up a ton of fruits and vegetables on weekends and pack them in containers, so you have easy access to healthy, ready-to-eat options during the week.

• Start slowly, by waking just 15-30 minutes earlier than usual.
• Allow yourself to sleep earlier.
• Put your alarm clock far from you bed. This way, you have to get up out of bed to shut it off.
• Go out of the bedroom as soon as you shut off the alarm. 
• Set something to do early in the morning that’s important. 
• Make waking up early a reward: make a hot cup of coffee for example, or a tasty breakfast.
• Take advantage of all that extra time .

Personal development often involves cultivating positive habits, as habits play a significant role in shaping behavior.

• Don't use your alarm clock unless you have to.
• Time your naps .
• Don't drink coffee before your nap.
• Avoid stress before napping.
• Don't exercise immediately before napping.
• Eat before your nap.
• Stick to a schedule.
• Don't use alcohol or sedatives to initiate a nap.

Are You Still Struggling With the Same Things You Were Last Year?(And maybe the year before that?)

Ryan Holiday writes, we need to stop expecting things to just simply happen. 

He references Marcus Aurelius’s book, Meditations, to one of his pieces of advice: Marcus tells himself to “be his own savior while he can.”

Ryan says, "And we do that by starting with some foundational habits and mindset shifts." In the following ideas Holiday suggests some foundational habits and mindset shifts to adopt so we can actually achieve our goals.

Four laws of building better habits

1. Cue:- Initiate behaviour
2. Craving:- Motivation or desire behind every habit
3. Response:- Habit you perform
4. Reward:- End goal of habit

Develop a routine that helps you unwind and prepare for sleep, such as taking a warm bath, reading a book, or practicing relaxation techniques like deep breathing.

Habits are said to be the building blocks of our success and it's believed that one with better habits has a higher chance of success.

But what about those who can't get into good habits, what about those who are suffering from bad habits?

It's nearly impossible for them to come out and to live a better life. But it's said that the word impossible says I am possible.

So let's find out the best ways you can break bad habits and get a new and better one now.

• 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.

If you are having trouble changing your habits then the problem is your system, not you. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again because you have the wrong system for change.

Take an example: You have a messy room and you set a goal to clean it, you did it and now you have a clean room for now. But what if you maintain your room do not repeat habits that led to a messy room? You won't be hoping for another burst of motivation to clean.

Sometimes it's hard to form habits but the only thing you can do is keep trying if you start a new habit and you did it the first day and you did it for 3 days regularly but you failed to do it on 4th day so it's alright you should do it the 5th day.

Just don't quit. It's okay not to have a streak just don't leave the habit and you will soon have a good habit. Let me tell you, you are on the right track

E-thinking has moved us into habits of grabbing our phones to answer the simplest of questions: finding the map directions to a known address, or calculating the square root of four.

While the verdict is still out if the internet is rewiring and/or dumbing us down, we should consider to what degree the internet is changing how we think.

Gradual changes in our lifestyle are easier to maintain than major changes introduced all at once. It won’t be difficult to spot where we could improve:

• Skipping breakfast? A small bowl of muesli, a piece of bread or fruit, could help slowly introduce it into our routine.
• Too few fruits and vegetables? To start with, introduce one extra piece a day.
• Favourite foods high in fat? Eliminating them abruptly could make us return to the old habits. Choose low fat options instead.
• Too little activity? Using the stairs daily could be a great first move.

It's important for a bunch of reasons. It jump-starts your metabolism and stops you from overeating later. Plus, studies show that adults who have a healthy breakfast do better at work, and kids who eat a morning meal score higher on tests. If a big plateful first thing isn't for you, keep it light with a granola bar or a piece of fruit. Just don't skip it.

• Identify a habit that you do every day. Make a list of all your current habits, to identify which would be suitable to stack new habits onto. It could be anything, as long as you perform it consistently. This habit will serve as your cue to start your new habit.
• Add the new habit right afterwards.
• When you’re creating a new habit, make things as easy as possible. It’s recommended to make new habits so easy that you’re able to do them, no matter how tired or unmotivated you are.

Tine is not the basis for productivity. Energy is.

Having all the time in the world won’t help you if you’re exhausted for most of it. Having good habits help in keeping you energized and be more resilient to burn out, both physically and mentally.

• Cue 1: Time - Most common way to trigger a new habit
• Cue 2: Location - Most powerful driver of mindless habits and also the least recognized
• Cue 3: Preceding Event - Many habits are a response to something else that happens in your life
• Cue 4: Emotional State - emotional state is a common cue for bad habits
• Cue 5: Other People - people you surround yourself with can play a role in your habits and behaviors.

Good Habits have certain characteristics: 

• Obvious: Put your gym bag by the door so you see it first thing in the morning.
• Attractive: Listen to your favorite music while you work out.
• Easy: Start your day with a 10-minute walk.
• Satisfying: Write down your progress in a habit tracker.

Bad Habits can be broken down by making them:

• Invisible: Hide your cigarettes so you don't see them every time.
• Unattractive: Think about how bad your breath smells after you smoking.
• Difficult: Set a goal to work for 25 minutes, even if you don't feel like it.
• Unsatisfying: Remember how bad slacking off feels.

The most important determinant of whether you'll achieve a goal or stay with a new habit is not self-discipline, nor rewards, nor willpower, nor motivation. It is focus.

Having multiple goals spreads out your focus and makes it less likely that you'll complete any of them. Maintain your attention on one goal at a time.

Jim Rohn highlights health as the foundation of a fulfilling and successful life. He advises making health a priority through balanced nutrition, regular exercise, and adequate rest.

Rohn suggests setting specific health goals, like a daily step target or a balanced diet plan. He also emphasizes the importance of mental wellness, advocating for practices like meditation or journaling to maintain a positive mindset.

Treat your body like a temple, as it's the only place you have to live and achieve your dreams.

•Loving yourself is a habit, and like any other habit, it requires practice.

•The best form of love you can gain is self-love. Love from other sources may be temporary, but the love you give yourself is always there when you need it.

•Every one is deserving of love. But loving yourself is a choice. And this requires you to believe that you are worthy of it. That way, it will be easier for you to love yourself and even give love to others.

1. Happiness looks different for everyone. For you, maybe it’s being at peace with who you are. Or having a secure network of friends who accept you unconditionally. Or the freedom to pursue your deepest dreams.
2. Regardless of your version of true happiness, living a happier, more satisfied life is within reach.
3. A few tweaks to your regular habits can help you get there.
4. Habits matter. Make positive habits part of your routine to instil happiness daily.

Create a motivation ritual by doing something you really like right before a difficult habit.

Habits are attractive when we associate them with positive feelings and unattractive when we associate them with negative feelings.

• Don't chase sleep. Don't go to bed early or sleep late. Don't nap.
• Don't go to be until you're sleepy. Sleepiness is when your eyes are drooping.
• Don't stay in bed unless you're asleep.
• Establish consistent daily routines and bedtime routines.
• Recognise when you sleep best, then stick with it.
• Don't tell yourself you won't be able to sleep. Instead, say that a bad night of sleep is okay.
• Keep a journal. Write down all the things you don't want to forget.
• If you start to ruminate in bed, think about the things you're grateful for.
• Listen to someone else's voice, like an unexciting audiobook.

1. Surround yourself with like-minded people who have similar habits
2. Remove triggers and anything that you think will lead to and eventual bad habit. You need to find those, you need to understand what causes them, and you need to just get rid of them.
3. Change your environment

~ It's not a number of days or years ~

~ It's every day from now on ~

They harden like concrete over time and they compound.

You have to ask: "Is this going to help me to get to where I want to go?"

A first practical step would be to write down five to ten bad habits that you know, that you can identify in your life, that you intentionally want to get rid of. 

Intention is important, because you have to intentionally, mindfully want to get rid of them.

To improve your idea generation, zoom out your perspective to a macro level. 

For example, on a micro-level, a Billy Joel concert may just be a fun way to spend a night. On a macro level, it is packed with ideas about how to connect with an audience.

• Habit dependency
• Users are only sticking to the habit because of artificial support
• Over-reliance on inflexible technology
• More flexible, customizable self-tracking apps are required to meet the multidimensional needs of users
• People abandon the app before the habit is established.

Learn how to notice small details.

It's not a superhuman ability. It's important to note when talking about Holmes that he has spent a lifetime cultivating the habits of mindfulness. So it's not like he was just born with this ability to be in touch with the world. What we choose to notice or not notice is a way of framing it in our own mind. We have a lot of bad habits in our mind, and we have to retrain ourselves to really notice the world. Everything we do rewires the brain, but we can rewire it in a way that mindfulness eventually becomes less of an effort. -- Konnikova

Acquiring self-discipline and working to instill a new habit can feel daunting at first, especially if you focus on the entire task at hand. To avoid feeling intimidated, keep it simple. Break your goal into small, doable steps. Instead of trying to change everything at once, focus on doing one thing consistently and master self-discipline with that goal in mind.

• Start the right behavior: Be clear that certain behaviors can be routines (requiring a deliberate effort) but can never become habits.
• Allocate time: Set up an implementation intention to plan to do something, setting aside a specific time for the activity.
• Embrace discomfort: Repeatedly doing new behaviors requires effort and perseverance. Reimagine your discomfort as a motivating factor, telling your mind that it is a necessary rite of passage.

The best way to face less resistance when doing good things is by slowly making it a habit. Good habits are tough to start. But they can give you enough momentum so that every good action will take less effort.

For example, while exercising can be difficult at first, it becomes much easier after consistent practice. Even when you are not motivated, you are much more likely to exercise because it has become a habit.

Self-control is only for the short term. You can achieve unimaginably great things if you develop good habits. And you will find that the benefits will go beyond what you expect.

The Healthy Eating Handbook: Lose weight, control sugar intake, and choose healthier foods for a happier you.

1. Make it obvious. Don’t hide your fruits in your fridge, put them on display front and center.
2. Make it attractive. Start with the fruit you like the most, so you’ll actually want to eat one when you see it.
3. Make it easy. Don’t create needless friction by focusing on fruits that are hard to peel. Bananas and apples are super easy to eat, for example.
4. Make it satisfying. If you like the fruit you picked, you’ll love eating it and feel healthier as a result!

• Set yourself up to succeed. Any new habit has to work inside your life and lifestyle.
• Think addition, not subtraction. Think what you can choose to “add in” so you can enrich your life experience.
• Go for a Public Display of Accountability. Once you put it out there on the public record, you knows that you'll be held responsible for any action.
• Find a success buddy .There are few things as powerful as two people locked arm and arm marching toward the same goal.
• Competition & camaraderie. There’s nothing like a friendly contest to whet your competitive spirit and immerse yourself in a new habit with a bang.
• Celebrate. There should be a time to celebrate, to enjoy some of the fruits of your victories along the way.

The goal is to do it every day (if possible) but if you miss a day, you must do the habit the following day.

Pros:

• Easier to keep up for longer stretches with harder habits.
• Easier to handle on an irregular schedule.

Cons:

• You’ll be much more likely to take days off unnecessarily if you know it’s only two-in-a-row that count.
• If you sometimes do X, and sometimes don’t, it will take longer to make the association automatic. 

Using the momentum effect -> start doing something, and then another -> "Hey this trigger is fulfilled. Let's go on to the next habit." Tip: you can also have a habit instead of a simple trigger.

Example of the trigger - habit - reward

"The trigger for me is waking up. The habit is reading, the reward is going to be breakfast."

• Early morning hours are so peaceful and quiet. 
• Rise early and you actually have time for breakfast.
• Easier to exercise. Exercising right after work is liable to be canceled because of other things that come up.
• Productivity. You can get much more done by starting on my work in the morning.
• Commute early, and the traffic is much lighter, and you get to work faster, and thus save yourself more time.
• It’s much easier to make those early appointments on time if you get up early. 

• Habit tracking allows you to visualize your progress and identify any recurrent setbacks
• It helps you adapt your approach and keep on improving your habit formation strategies
• It can improve your mental health and motivation
• It reminds you to act
• It celebrates micro-wins
• It makes you feel a sense of accomplishment before the effects of good habits start to show.

Keystone habits are very individualistic. For Every individual, there is a keystone habit that can change their life. They just have to find it.

These are some keystone habits that can transform your life. See for yourself which ones speak to you the most.

1)Meditation

2)Journaling

3)Running

4)Working out

5)Waking up early

6)Tracking your Expenses

7)Tracking your productivity hours

8)Doing Yoga

9)Having a skincare routine

10)Reading....etc

• You don’t need to exclude friends who are going through temporarily rough times, but you should consider who you spend your time with when there are people who consistently create one-sided emotional exchanges as the basis for your relationships. Everyone needs a shoulder to cry on sometimes, but some people will expect you to be their permanent shoulder.

Try this: Set a time limit on friends who leave you feeling drained.

1. Eat a variety of foods
2. Base your diet on plenty of foods rich in carbohydrates
3. Replace saturated with unsaturated fat
4. Enjoy plenty of fruits and vegetables
5. Reduce salt and sugar intake
6. Eat regularly, control the portion size
7. Drink plenty of fluids
8. Maintain a healthy body weight
9. Get on the move, make it a habit!
10. Start now! And keep changing gradually.

Habits often tend to occur subconsciously, which means we don't think about them consciously.

They are well established when your brain stops spending resources on certain tasks, so they become lower part of your thought process.

Example: Like thinking about turning your blinker or washing your hands.

• Identify your triggers: Look at your list of bad habits. Figure out the “who,” the “what,” the “where,” and the “when” underlying each bad behavior.
• Clean the house. Get rid of whatever enables your bad habits.
• Look again at your list of bad habits. How can you alter them so that they’re not as harmful? Can you replace them with healthier habits or drop-kick them altogether?
• Ease in. For some of your old habits, it may be more effective to take small steps to ease into unwinding them.
• Or jump in. We are all different and some researchers have found that it can be paradoxically easier for people to make lifestyle changes if they change a great many bad habits at once.

You can create many more good habits if you make them evident. You just need to take your time to do that.

Let’s say you want to exercise more, for example. Who doesn’t want to exercise more, right?

You could use your motivation to pick up your workout mat and place it somewhere, and you will probably fail. Or, you can put it beside your bed and keep it there.

• Find a hook for any healthy routine you want to build.
• Place the hook in your environment somewhere you can see it every day.
• Notice if there are any connections between routines. If there are, one routine can become the hook for the second.

Eating a variety of foods, regularly, and in the right amounts is the best formula for a healthy diet.

Paying attention to portion size will help us not to consume too much calories, and will allow us to eat all the foods we enjoy, without having to eliminate any.

• Cooking the right amount makes it easier to not overeat.
• Some reasonable serving sizes are: 100 g of meat; one medium piece of fruit; half a cup of raw pasta.
• Using smaller plates helps with smaller servings.
• Packaged foods, with calorie values on the pack, could aid portion control.
• If eating out, share a portion with a friend.

• Set a very clear intention of how your day will go, particularly in the beginning, the night before. Visualizing your intention and writing it down into your schedule can make it happen more automatically when you wake up.

Try this: Before you go to bed, write down your plan for the next day and visualize it.

Firstly you have to make a list of all the things and habits you do in the morning, afternoon or evening. 

Here's a sample of where your list might be:

• Wake up
• Turn off alarm
• Check my phone
• Go to the bathroom
• Weigh myself
• Take a shower
• Brush my teeth
• Floss my teeth
• Put on deodorant
• Hang up towel to dry
• Get dressed
• Make a cup of tea

You hear it all the time, including several times in this article, but your physical and mental health are closely intertwined.

As you build habits to improve your happiness, make sure to follow up with routine appointments to take care your body:

• see your primary care physician for an annual physical check up.
• take care of any chronic health conditions and see specialists as recommended.
• see your dentist for an oral exam and follow up as recommended.
• get your vision checked.

• Outcome-based habits focus on what you want to achieve. Identity-based habits focus on who you wish to become.
• Usually, people try to change their habits by focusing on what they want to achieve, resulting in outcome-based habits.
• But the author's approach focus on identity-based habits. With this approach, we focus on who we desire to become.
• Research has shown that once a person believes in a particular aspect of their identity, they are more likely to act as per their belief.
• For instance - If you believe you have nice hair then you will develop all sorts of habits to maintain your hair.

• The benefits here are mostly psychological. If you've gotten some important work done, your mood is more likely good and you'll feel productive.
• The other reason for this approach is that deep work isn’t always sustainable for the full workday. Better to concentrate it into a specific period than randomly insert it across chunks of time.

Try this: Make the first four hours of your morning a quiet, deep work zone.

• Although it might not feel like it, seven to eight hours are pretty much mandatory to stay cognitively sharp in the long-run.
• For some people the sleep deprivation may have mentally plateaued. Yet, experiments showed that sleep deprivation caused continuous declines in mental performance, even though subjects felt like they were holding steady.

Try this: Go to bed by 10pm every night, including weekends, for the next thirty days.

Be specific on how you’ll implement goals into your daily life. Examining how you’ve responded to the situation in the past and determining what you can do to avoid reverting to the old habit, might be all it takes to break the habit.

It’s easier to react based on something you’ve already planned out in the past versus trying to come up with a new plan on the fly. 

• Choose the right tool (paper or an app). Whichever method you choose, ensure that it doesn’t get in the way of the habit itself, as habits will only form with long-term repetition.
• Decide if you are forming or breaking a habit. Habit tracking can be used not only to form habits but to break them as well.
• Apply the “never miss twice” principle. It’s easy to feel discouraged when making or breaking habits, especially when life gets in the way. If you go to bed later than you wanted to, don’t be hard on yourself. Instead, say out loud: “Never miss twice.” 

• Make a habit of doing some pushups or burpees every day. These will get your heart pumping and blood moving, and they don’t require setting aside a lot of time from your already busy schedule.
• You can add gym or fitness classes on top of this foundational habit, but this basic investment in exercise will keep you sharp when you can’t make it to the gym.

Try this: Do at least 10 burpees every day.

• You need to become the salesperson for your own goals. Not for other people, but for yourself.
• Part of that starts with packaging—how you frame your goals and projects can have a huge effect on your motivation. Is this something you have to do? Or an exciting challenge?

Try this: Set aside ten minutes every day to think about what today’s actions are helping you build towards.

• Create checklists by imagining the best way to complete your task in detail.
• The 2-minute rule. Take enough 2-minute tasks to create momentum. Start with anything, but end with tasks related to your intended work.
• The hour non-negotiable. Force yourself to work on your project for the first hour of the day to give you momentum for the rest of the day.
• The celebration/resting day. Plan a day where you allow yourself to do anything you enjoy doing, regardless of what it is.
• Habit bunching. Create support habits, such as making coffee before you start working.
• Mini-days (time-bocking). If a day feels too dull, break it down into mini-days: one for work, one for learning skills, and one for relaxation.
• The hourly challenge. Plan to give your best work every hour. Define how much work you need to do in that hour to consider it a personal record.
• Buffering. Allow a 30-50% margin of error for all your expectations.
• OKR Goal-setting system. (Objective Keyword Result). Set a quarterly or monthly goal. Give yourself three actionable metrics based on numbers. (e.g., Make 500 sales calls in three months.)
• Environment optimization. When you finish using a room, make it ready so you can use it next time. Keep distractions out of sight.