How to Create Effective Habits
We are our habits. A huge part of our lives is determined by our habitual behaviour and we can spend a lot of our time doing things on autopilot without thinking. This can be both a blessing and a curse. Personally, I think it’s worth taking some time to think about our habits and see if they are working for us… or against us. For most of us, there will be a mix of both positive and negative habits in our lives. Positive habits might include an exercise routine, meditation or reading. Negative habits might include going on our phones as soon as we wake up, eating junk food or biting our nails. Habits will obviously vary from person to person.
When assessing our habits, it’s important to create a list of the things we want to change (negative habits) and then create a list of new habits that we want to start doing (positive habits). There are several ways that we can do this but the first step in making any change is becoming aware that something needs to change. That’s why it’s extremely important to have the positive/negative habit list. When we have the list, we can start working through it.
Working with negative habits
Changing a negative habit is tricky as it can be fully wired into our brains. We therefore need to really want to make the change. We can’t just think that we ought to make the change. We need to REALLY want to make the change. This helps us to give value to the inevitable discomfort and frustration that we will encounter when trying to break a negative habit cycle.
When we are committed to making the change, we then need to alter the automatic process of the habit. Sometimes we can start doing our negative habit without even thinking about it. One minute you’re sat in traffic and then suddenly you realise that you’ve chewed half of your nail off! We need to become aware of the negative habit right at the start so our conscious and reasoning brain can jump in and save the day.
It will help to think about what triggers these habits in the first place. If stress is a trigger for nail biting, smoking, binge eating etc, it’s important to become aware of this. When you notice the trigger, you can start to wedge in a delay tactic. If you can squeeze in a delay tactic (even just holding off the negative habit for one minute) it can help the craving to pass. Repeatedly do this and you can start to break the craving cycle. This is obviously a lot easier to write than actually do! A delay tactic can be as simple as counting out loud or focusing on your breath.
Another tactic to use when fighting off a negative habit craving is to become fully aware of the sensations that the craving is causing in your body. Mindfully acknowledging the feelings and then exploring them can help you to detach from them. It sounds counter-intuitive but exploring the sensations in your body and objectively observing them can make a big difference. If you observe the sensations of craving for long enough, they will eventually pass.
Another trick to avoid bad habits is to remove temptation from your environment. If you are obsessed with salt and vinegar crisps and want to eat them all day long (guilty), not filling your cupboards with them helps. The harder it is for you to get your hands on the thing you crave, the better!
There are many more ways to work with negative habits but the above are a good place to start. The other thing you can do is to flip the negative habit and use it as a trigger for a good habit. For example, instead of going on your phone when you wake up, you might choose to read instead.
Creating positive habits
Creating positive habits works in a different way to negative ones. You aren’t trying to remove automatic behaviour, you are trying to programme it. The best way to start a new positive habit is to stack it on top of something you already do. Use a current habit as the trigger to do the new habit. Let’s suppose that you want to start a morning stretching routine to help you manage tight hamstrings. Rather than try and do this at some random point in the day when you get a few minutes, it makes sense for it to have a regular slot in your day. If it’s important to you, then it deserves the time of day. You therefore might stack this habit on the back of brushing your teeth. As soon as you finish brushing your teeth, go and stretch. Do this for long enough and eventually the habits will fuse together. They will become automatic.
It’s easy to expand this further… having a morning routine is one of the best ways to create effective habits (in my opinion). Creating a series of positive habits that you want to do and having a clear structure as to when you will do them works wonders! It starts the day well and can become a chain of events. Brushing your teeth triggers your stretching which triggers your reading which triggers your Mongolian throat singing practice. The list of possibilities is endless but stacking your habits like this works incredibly well.
To help keep momentum when first establishing a new positive habit, recording it is extremely helpful. All you need to do is draw a tick on your calendar (or something similar) and start to create a chain. The goal is to not break the chain for as long as possible. The interesting thing with this is that the longer the chain gets, the harder it is to break. You end up not wanting to break the chain. After long enough (some people say three months) the positive habit will be fully integrated into your life and be part of who you are.
I have a habit tracker on my phone that allows me to tick the box if I do my positive habit. In case you’re interested, the app is called Way of Life. It works in the same way as the chain method above and allows me to keep track of my habit progress.
If you want to explore creating and removing positive and negative habits from your life further, I highly recommend the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. This is a fantastic resource for establishing effective habits. Good luck!
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. ”