How To Create Good Habits In 6 Simple Steps
Why develop good habits?
Habits are the basics of your success. Yet despite the importance of habits, few people know much about how they work. While everyone has their own idea of healthy living, it’s nothing more than a set of small consistent actions people do on a daily basis. In other words, healthy living is built on good habits. Being consistent and disciplined is the key to developing good habits which can significantly improve the quality of their lives down the road. Without much additional effort – habits will make it automatic.
What Art Habits
A habit is something we do regularly without consciously thinking much about it. It is an automatic mental and behavioral activity. It can take anywhere from 18 to 254 days for a person to form a new habit and an average of 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic. Habits make it possible for us to do things without spending exorbitant mental effort. They make everyday life possible - for good or bad.
Consider When Creating Good Habits
1 - Start with Small Adjustments
Most people think that they can achieve everything in a single day which ends up getting them nothing in the end. Instead of going for fixing everything in a small amount of time, it is better to make small, yet effective adjustments so that your mind can handle these gradual positive changes in a proper way.
Every big habit is supported by many smaller habits. Find the small habit and develop that first. It's easy to do many little things over and over again.
Usually, it’s the mental struggle to do something new that’s very challenging. Once you start something, more often than not it gets easier to carry on. Like getting out the door to start the run or getting in the car to drive to the gym. One of the most effective ways to ensure consistency and make sure good habits stick is to be great at starting. Make the activity ridiculously easy to begin and repeat that ‘start process’ until it becomes a habit.
2 - Be Positive
Whenever you decide to develop any good habits in you, one of the key elements is to stay optimistic. Positive thinking not only helps you to overcome negative feelings but also enables you to deal with stress-related issues in an effective manner.
Positive thinking doesn’t mean ignoring all the things and continuing with your daily activities but it’s about reacting positively to all the unpleasant things.
You cultivate an attitude of gratitude by taking time out every day to focus on the positive. Any time you experience negative or pessimistic thoughts, use this as a cue to shift gears and think about something positive. In time, a positive attitude will become a way of life.
3 - make the Decision, Commit to it
Well, it may sound easy to most but it is actually not as easy as it sounds. Commitment is not only a promise that you make with yourself to achieve something, but it’s also the dedication to give your time and energy to a specific job, enthusiastically.
If you stay committed to working on good habits, your chances of success greatly increase. Challenges and obstacles will come your way but it is important to stay determined and manage all the challenges with a positive attitude. Keep your focus on your main goal which is to make that good habit a part of your life.
And once you understand that habits can change, you have the freedom and the responsibility to remake them. -Charles Duhigg
4- Take Time to think about what is holding you back
Sometimes, it’s not a good habit that is a challenge to adopt but it is all the things that are attached to it that make it a hassle holding you back from practicing that good habit. Once you identify the things that hold you back, then it becomes easy to come up with a perfect solution to overcome these problems.
Because our brain does not like changes. It prefers us to stay the same so we can be safe. Nature has gifted us with useful fears that are designed to protect us from real dangers — like lions and starvation. But in modern times, we rarely experience real dangers. Instead, most fears are destructive and hold us back from realizing our true potential.
5 - Celebrate Your Small Wins
When you reward yourself for making progress, you stimulate the reward circuit of your brain that gives you a sense of achievement and motivates you to do even better.
So, it’s a good practice to reward yourself after every successful step towards victory because it boosts your strength and power to make even the impossible happen.
If you’re like most people, you’re much better at beating yourself up for a bad performance than you are at rewarding yourself for a good one. When it comes to managing ourselves, for some reason, we seem to prefer the stick to the carrot. And that’s a shame because research has shown that celebrating your progress is crucial for your motivation.
6 - Focus on Building a Routine
If you want to add a good habit to your life, then you must focus on the journey and staying positive. If you are loving the process and staying consistent you will not only be able to practice that habit more, but it will become a part of your daily routine.
Small Steps
When you are trying to create positivity in your life through goals and habits but you are overwhelmed and don't know where to start try the: 5 following steps to help you achieve your goal:
1. Commit to Thirty Days – Three to four weeks is all the time you need to make a habit automatic. If you can make it through the initial conditioning phase, it becomes much easier to sustain. A month is a good block of time to commit to a change since it easily fits in your calendar.
2. Make it Daily – Consistency is critical if you want to make a habit stick. If you want to start exercising, go to the gym every day for your first thirty days. Going a couple of times a week will make it harder to form the habit. Activities you do once every few days are trickier to lock in as habits.
3. Start Simple – Don’t try to completely change your life in one day. It is easy to get over-motivated and take on too much. If you wanted to study two hours a day, first make the habit to go for thirty minutes and build on that.
4. Remind Yourself – Around two weeks into your commitment it can be easy to forget. Place reminders to execute your habit each day or you might miss a few days. If you miss time it defeats the purpose of setting a habit, to begin with.
5. Stay Consistent – The more consistent your habit the easier it will be to stick. If you want to start exercising, try going at the same time, to the same place for your thirty days. When cues like time of day, place, and circumstances are the same in each case it is easier to stick.
Keep On Going
You might have heard from someone that it takes around 21 days to create a habit, but in reality, that’s not the case. To build a good habit, you need an excellent plan, motivation, and routine, otherwise; it is near to impossible in the real world.
When you repeat a habit for a long time, then it automatically becomes a habit. You don’t need to put a lot of extra effort to develop good habits in your life. It’s just the starting phase that needs a lot of attention.
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