Have you ever noticed that “bad” habits seem to sneak into your life like a ninja unnoticed and then before you know it you can’t stop? Have you ever also noticed that whatever bad habit you need to let go of is it takes a lot from you, just as much as starting a new habit that could be helpful to you is hard?
This is the ultimate conundrum most individuals are faced with. Breaking old habits and creating new ones. Now: how do you get over all this in order to improve your life?
Mastering Self-Discipline: Your Key to Habit Transformation
Discipline is one of the most important things that one needs to be aware of in their self-development journey of building good habits or breaking bad ones, thus it is very important knowing how to become more disciplined.
Most people think that just because they do something for a week or a month that everything will change for them and they will suddenly become better and thus hold on to their habits forever. This however is not the case in real life.
To know how to do something e.g. learn a new skill, is something that is relatively easy. Becoming great at it is what is a challenge…and you can only become great at something you do habitually. In order to achieve anything, you need to have discipline and persistence. So take your habits seriously, they are bricks that build who you are.
The Art of Anchoring: How to Stay Committed to New Habits
The one thing we are never taught is how to achieve that discipline or how to become persistent. After all, how do you know when you are being persistent versus when you are being pushy?
The easiest method to keep to a new habit is actually to anchor it to something you are already doing. An anchor is basically something that you will associate with an activity such that later when toy mention it, it reminds you of the activity. A classic examole of the principle of anchoring is the Pavlov’s dogs.
Pavlov would ring a bell everytime he was about to feed his dogs. After a long period of this, Pavlov then decided to ring a bell without bringing the food. Surprisingly (then), the dogs would salivate as soon as the bell ring. The bell was the anchor and it triggered expectation of food.
The principle is powerful yet underrated because there are a lot of things that you do daily that you just never think of using as anchors. You could make sure that you exercise every morning before you bath or perhaps every evening before you go to bed. Each of this allows you to remember the habit you plan on building each time you are about to bath or go to sleep in the latter example.
Taking the First Step: Building Habits That Last
Once you have started, it gets better. The reason is that inertia is such that one keeps on doing what they are already doing on a daily basis and thus it’s hard to start a new habit when you do not already have any habit. But once you’ve started, you are more likely to keep discipline and build the habit.
Stay Accountable, Achieve Results: Building Accountability Structures for Habit Maintenance
Accountability is also a very good way to maintain a habit. Depending on how serious you are, you could use a friend to remind you to keep going when you feel like giving up. This is in a unique context though. Give your friend a certain amount of money and tell them to keep it unless youth complete a certain task involving the habit yog are trying to build.
A typical example of using accountability to ensure that you turn something into a habit is giving a colleague 500 bucks and for every 1page you type of that book you have always promised yourself to write they give you 100 bucks back. The exact technically can differ and be modified how you prefer, however, this should be something that helps you stay disciplined and be more likely to achieve your goals by staying true to your powerful habits.
Breaking the Chains: Liberating Yourself from Negative Habits
If you realise that every day we are always doing something majority of the time and that we have different habits that we practice daily, you have a good perception of the bigger picture.
The importance of the statement above is that you need to realize that all you need is to do something else in order to stop the bad habit. Let’s take the classical one of smoking. If you are a habitual smoker and you want to stop, find something else that tough will do instead of putting that cigarette between your lips.
The reason things like e-cigarettes work for people is that they offer an alternative to the current habit. A habit can mostly be replaced by another habit more easily because one just needs to keeo doing something -which is probably why fidget spinners were such a catch.
Instead of smoking, you could write down 10 things that make you happy. Not only is that a punishment, but also it offers a very decent alternative. Writing about good times makes tot feel good and therefore each time you did that, you’d be helping yourself grow as a person.
Building new habits needs you to hack your mind and write down the reasons you want to start those new habits. It would also be helpful to write down who you think you will become in the future if you stick to those habits and also, who you think you will become if you don’t stick to your good habits.
This works primarily because you target the deeper parts of your brain, thereby making you constantly aware of what you want to achieve and what you want to avoid.
All you have to do is then consistently look at what you have written down and get to work. It has to be a journey you are constantly on.
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