In Creating Good Habits we discussed the importance of creating habits that last. We also gave examples of some of the areas in our lives where we’ve utilised good habits to change for the better. In this post, we want to take more of a practical look at HOW you create good habits.
There are various tricks you can use to make a new habit much more likely to stick. But if you approach it in the wrong way, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
Make It Enjoyable and Aligned with Your Goals
When you’re trying to create good habits for yourself, the most important thing is to make them enjoyable and aligned with your goals.
If you enjoy the process, you will stick to it. Likewise, if it meets with your goals/philosophy, you will have an intrinsic reason to follow your new habits.
This is the key to long term success. A habit built on more extrinsic motivations (to show off, for example!) will be much less likely to stick.
Start Small
If you try to make a huge change to your lifestyle immediately, you will struggle.
Why not make a tiny step first and see how it goes? In all likelihood, you will find this first step easy. Each step you take will make you feel better and give you the desire to add the next.
Before you know it, you’ve made the huge change but without it feeling like such a big deal! If you can slowly chip away at longer term goals in this way, you’ll be amazed at how much you achieve when you look back.
The Importance of Remaining Flexible
Above all, remember that you need to remain flexible. It’s no good creating such habits if you will be stressed out by the pressure to achieve them. This is the case with our bedtime routine as we discussed in the earlier post. We accept that this won’t always go to plan, but we have the right intent and will follow our habits when we can.
This isn’t always easy, but we try to remind ourselves that failure to meet the ‘ideal’ habit doesn’t mean you’ve failed overall and should give up!
Tag New Habits on to Existing Routines
This is another one we learnt from Dr Rangan Chaterjee. Over the last few months Mr Way has listened to every episode of his podcast and learnt a great deal!
In Episode #92 How to Make Lifestyle Changes That Will Last, Rangan discussed how to use this method to ensure new habits stick. If there’s something you already do every day (examples: brushing your teeth, cooking, boiling the kettle or getting changed when you get home from work), adding a new habit at this time is much more likely to be successful than if you just try to ‘squeeze it in’.
If you want to get fitter and can’t manage to squeeze it in to your schedule, why not do a quick 5 minute routine while waiting for the pasta to cook? You can very quickly do some bodyweight exercises in 5 minutes which would make a big difference. You’ll often find that you enjoy those 5 minutes so much that it soon becomes a bigger commitment.
This also ties in well with ‘Start Small’. If you can make a small change and tag it on to an existing routine, you’re much more likely to succeed.
Miss way finds it best to incorporate her exercise in this way. She bikes or runs to work when possible and often does a Parkrun on the way to do the food shopping!
We hope you can use some of these techniques to help drive positive change in your lives. If you have any other top tips on how to create good habits we’d love to hear about them in the comments!