Depending on whether they are healthy habits or bad habits, habits determine if we’re going to be happy or unhappy. Healthy or unhealthy. Tired or well-rested. Strong or weak. The power of habits is far-reaching.
Habits shape our attitudes, actions, and decision-making abilities. And they affect every aspect of our lives.
But before we can build good habits, we need to understand what habits are and how they’re formed. We also need to know what mistakes we should avoid in the process.
A habit is a tendency to do something, whether harmful or health-promoting.
A good habit will help you reach your goals, develop both personally and professionally, and feel fulfilled. However, not all habits are good.
Habits are driven by reward-seeking mechanisms in the brain. They’re often triggered by something specific. For instance, walking past a cafe and smelling coffee beans can trigger you to want a cup. Feeling stressed at work can trigger you to smoke a cigarette.
After a while, habits become a repetitive part of your lifestyle.
Here are some other examples of habits:
- Brushing your teeth after eating a meal
- Putting on your seatbelt when you get inside a car
- Drinking a glass of wine when you get home from work
- Eating sugary or salty foods when you're stressed at work
- Fidgeting with your notebook during a meeting
And our brain's tendency toward efficiency can be positive.
For instance, drinking a green smoothie every morning benefits your health. And not having to relearn how to drive your car every day means you have reliable transportation.
Of course, this efficiency can also be negative.
For instance, biting your nails every time you have a meeting at work can wreak havoc on your nails. Or not brushing your teeth after eating can lead to tooth decay.
Habit-forming is the process in which behaviors become automatic. It can be an intentional process, or it can happen unplanned.
For instance, you were most likely taught to wash your hands as a child. And after a while, washing your hands became automatic. It wasn’t intentional — it happened after lots of repetition.
Replacing your nightly glass of wine with a glass of water, on the other hand, is intentional. So is replacing your morning cup of caffeinated coffee with decaf.
One thing to keep in mind about the habit-forming process is that it doesn’t happen occasionally. It’s an endless feedback loop that’s running and active during every moment you’re alive. That brings us to the habit loop.
The way you define the goal you hope to turn into a habit does matter. Goals such as “meditate regularly” are too abstract, research has shown. You’ll benefit from being more specific about what exactly you aim to do and how often.
Don’t say “I’ll meditate regularly.” Say, “I’ll meditate for 15 minutes each day.”
Having a bite-size objective makes it less daunting to get started and easier to see your progress.
Now that you have established a specific goal, it’s time to think about what will cue you to follow through. Scientists have proven that you’ll make more progress toward your goal if you decide not just what you’ll do, but when you’ll be cued to do it, as well as where you’ll do it and how you’ll get there.
A plan like “I’ll study Spanish for 30 minutes, five days a week” is OK. But a detailed, cue-based plan like “Every workday after my last meeting, I’ll spend 30 minutes studying Spanish in my office” is much more likely to stick as a habit.
Making this kind of plan reduces the chances you’ll forget to follow through because the when and where in your plan will serve as cues to action that jog your memory. Even better: Put your plan on your calendar so you’ll get a digital reminder. An established, hyperspecific plan also forces you to anticipate and maneuver around obstacles and makes procrastination feel more sinful.
As you progress with your new habit, reflect on how it's working for you. If you're struggling to stick to it, think about why this is. Were you too ambitious? If so, consider setting a more manageable short-term goal to remotivate yourself.
Or, if your new habit isn't delivering the change that you expected, reflect on what's gone wrong. You may need to tweak your habit to make sure that it's delivering real change.
We all know about good habits. Wash your hands before eating. Exercise every day. Save for retirement.
But we often start a new habit only to see our efforts fizzle out in a few weeks — or even days.
And we often blame ourselves. I don’t have enough willpower! But it’s not that simple. Habit-building is a brain science. Once you understand it, your odds of success will multiply exponentially.
0 comments:
Post a Comment