There’s an increasing will among the general population to ‘live a better life’. But how exactly do you achieve that? Creating good habits is at the center of achieving your goals and making changes that last.

Decisions, Decisions 

In modern life we face almost unlimited choice in everything we do. Of course, this choice has its benefits. We can eat whatever we like, live where we want, take part in endless social activities etc etc.  

But all of this choice comes at a price. The number of decisions we face on a day-to-day basis can sometimes be overwhelming for our highly intelligent simplistic human brains.  

We didn’t evolve dealing with this many options. It was usually a case of accepting the hand you were dealt in the name of survival! We were free to make the important decisions as and when needed. 

Every decision you face can be viewed as a small dose of stress on your brain. Each trivial decision you make removes your capacity to make a more important decision elsewhere. We all have a different capacity for these stress doses, but once your limit is reached, you will find you quickly start to feel overwhelmed. 

The Fightback 

In recent years, there has been somewhat of a fightback against this excess of choice. People have started to recognise the issue and try to remove some of the decision making from their lives. 

A popular example of this is Steve Jobs. As we mentioned in our post on minimalism he would wear the same clothes every day. This removed the choice from his day-to-day life and reduced the stress he faced in making minor decisions. This allowed him to carry out his job, making important decisions on business and creativity.

He was widely credited with turning around Apple from near-bankruptcy to the global colossus we know today. 

Your Secret Weapon 

The secret weapon we can use to overcome this endless list of decisions is creating good habits.  Once set up, creating these simple habits will allow you to go about your daily life on auto-pilot, avoiding the stress of continuous decision making.  

Habits can be formed in all different aspects of your life. We’ve been trying to apply this theory to various aspects of our lives of the past few years. 

We thoroughly research each area and decide how we want to approach it. We can then leave these habits running in the background, without continually making new decisions day in day out.  

Investing 

Creating good habits in investing not only takes away the stress of decision making; it also usually helps you avoid costly mistakes! 

One of the most common mistakes investors make is trying to time the markets, investing when they think something is ‘good value’ and bound to go up. In truth, you can never be certain of this and are better off developing a hands-off, passive investing approach. 

We have our investments in 100% stocks, meaning we don’t have to think about re-balancing into different asset classes and can simply let the stock market do its job. 

Our direct debits are set up to drip-feed money into our accounts every month. The money is then allocated to a pre-selected list of passive index funds with a global mix.   

With this approach, we will never be tempted to try and ‘time the market’ by investing more in a particular month, or into different allocations.

Because we’re very comfortable with the good habits we have created, we very rarely think about our investments now. We can review them as and when we need to (usually annually), but there is little to no stress over making new decisions. We can simply sit back and watch our balances grow! 

Exercise 

Our exercise routines have altered dramatically over the last 5 years or so. We discuss this in much more detail in Frugal Fitness. Not only have we managed to make our exercise more frugal, but we have also created habits which make it much easier to achieve consistency. 

As we discussed in Bodyweight Fitness, Mr Way works out two mornings a week before work. He writes his own programmes/timetables, which keeps the workouts interesting and challenging. This is a routine which he has kept up for almost 3 years now and works perfectly for him.  

On the non-workout mornings, he spends time on his other goals such as handstand training, stretching/yoga, blogging etc! 

Creating a timetable has been a key factor in making this good habit stick. It gives accountability, while also being rewarding. Long term goals can be broken down into achievable short term stepping stones, meaning you’re always moving towards something bigger. 

Food 

We’ve created various habits in order to make our meals run on auto-pilot. In our recent post How We Cut Our Food Shopping Bill In Half, we discussed how we have: 

• Create weekly meal plans 
• Prepare in advance, usually cooking for 3 days at a time 
• Write a comprehensive list each week, ensuring we only buy what we need 
• Researched and discovered cheap, tasty, and easy to cook meals which we love. We have a list of meals which we can pick from on the days when we lack inspiration! 

All of this automation allows us to enjoy our food with as little thought and time input as possible. This process really works for us and we’re in a continuous routine. 

Bedtime routine 

An area where we’re still hopeless improving is our bedtime routine. We really struggle with our sleep and we’re both absolutely useless when we don’t get enough! 

We have been working on this for a while now, as well as researching the best ideas in a lot of detail. Dr Chatterjee’s podcast has been really helpful here, as well as ideas from The Bodyweight Warrior.  

Essentially, we would like to create a good habit where we are beginning to wind down long before bed time. Some of the key points would be: 

• Aim for 9 hours sleep 
• No bright lights at least 2 hours before bed. Includes screens!! 
• Always wake at the same time, even at weekends 
• Meditation before bed 

The biggest reason we struggle in this area is the lack of a regular routine. Miss Way is often working until after 9pm on weeknights, and Mr Way often plays tennis until a similar time! This means we cannot regularly apply all of these principles.  

The main point is that we have the right intentions here. Sometimes we priorities work/play over this, but that’s a personal choice.  

Is creating good habits important to you? Do you have any particular tricks to make new habits stick? Let us know!