How Habits Affect Your Life + How to Make them Work for You
Habits aren’t something that most people think about regularly until you’re trying to make a change. Habits by nature are subconscious and exist in response to specific stimuli. This is also called ‘Cue, Routine, Reward’ in Charles Duhigg’s book The Power of Habit.
“Habits are the compound interest of self improvement.” ~ James Clear (Atomic Habits)
By definition, habits are repeated actions or behaviours that you do with such frequency that you may not be aware of them. You might find yourself in the middle of the action or have even completed it before you realize what you are doing.
Your brain does this to free up mental space for so many other things. This is critical to your being able to do anything else in a day. Your brain is designed to shift as many actions as possible from conscious action to subconscious action (habits) and as a result, this frees up your mental load.
Consider driving a car. If you had to actively think about unlocking the car, opening the door, sitting in the car, putting your seatbelt on, putting the key in the ignition, turning the key, placing your foot off the brake pedal, reaching out to the gear shift and moving it to reverse, looking around, releasing the break, moving your foot to the gas pedal, looking around again and then finally backing out of your parking space, that would take so much time and brain power. It was probably tiring just to read all of that. Instead, these actions now happen in a matter of seconds without conscious thought because you’ve built a habit.
Habits are critical to your success as a human being; however, habits can be either beneficial, detrimental, or neutral when measured against your goals and the life you envision for yourself.
The Compound Interest of Habits
Would you rather have one penny that doubles every day for 30 days or 1 million dollars today?
I’ll take the penny!
You may be wondering why. The answer is the magic of compound interest.
The penny that doubles doesn’t look like much at first. It only amounts to $0.64 by day 7. By day 11, it has grown to $10.24. By day 14, it is $81.92. It’s not until day 28 that it surpasses the 1 million mark. By day 30, it’s over 5 million.
Habits are like the penny. The results seem non-existent until a certain point where the consistent effort tips from latent effort to actual results. This is true for both beneficial habits and detrimental habits.
Every goal (outcome) is a result of a system (habit). Net worth is a result of financial habits, a clutter-free space is a result of cleaning habits and knowledge is a result of learning habits.
Change
Change can be hard at times, sometimes very hard, but not impossible!
As a human being, you resist change because your brain is hardwired to resist change. Change is interpreted as a threat which releases stress hormones into the body so your body can protect you from change. Hint - your body doesn’t understand the difference between a “positive/beneficial” change and a “negative/detrimental” change; it only understands that you’re not following the established response to the stimuli that just occurred.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t or won’t change. You’re capable of change!
Change takes three things to be possible:
You’re not happy with the way things are now.
You have a positive idea of the way you’d like things to be.
You have concrete steps to make this idea a reality.
These three things combined outweigh the resistance to change. This is also why things like the 5 Second Rule by Mel Robbins work. When you are struggling to begin a task, using something to disrupt the feeling of resistance your brain is creating is often enough to get you started. Mel Robbins suggests counting backwards from 5 to 1 and then simply doing the thing you need to do.
Your Nature as a Human Being
If you believe yourself to be one thing and then try to change without changing your belief about who you are, you’ll always fall back into old habits that reinforce who you believe yourself to be.
Does this mean that you should give up on reaching your goals and achieving your dreams? NO! It means that you have to change how you go about it.
Consider two people, both are trying to quit smoking. When offered a cigarette, one says ‘no thanks, I’m trying to quit’, and the other says ‘no thanks, I’m not a smoker’. One believes they’re a smoker trying to quit and the other believes they’re a non-smoker. The non-smoker will be successful because they’re not struggling against a goal that asks them to be different from who they believe they are.
What Habits Are You Looking to Change?
After reading this, you may be already thinking of things that you want to change. You may also not be aware of all of your habits.
I tell my patient’s this all the time:
Awareness is the key to making any change. You can’t change what you don’t know is happening
Step one of actually making the healthy changes you want to change is to create a habits list. Habits by their very definition are subconscious. Let’s make them conscious!
You can do this on the notes app on your phone, with pen and paper or any other method of your choosing. Start by writing down everything you do in a day from getting up, to making the bed, to scrolling through social media, etc. right through to bedtime. It’s ideal to do this on a weekday and a weekend day so you can see the differences.
After you’ve created your list(s), create some time to look at the list(s) as a whole. Beside each item, you’re going to mark a +, -, or = sign. + is a beneficial habit that brings something good to your life. - is a detrimental habit that maybe leaves you feeling unhappy, not enough, or something else that drains your energy. = is a neutral habit. It’s neither beneficial nor detrimental.
Once you have all your habits marked, you can start to look at the habits you actually want to change or add in.
Now you can begin to apply some of these tips and tricks to help motivate you to make the changes you truly want in your life. Take small steps to create big changes; imagine yourself as the person you want to be and make the change from there. When you’re doing something that seems like a struggle remember 5,4,3,2,1 - just start.
In future articles we’ll explore additional ways to create good habits and let go of detrimental ones. I look forward to seeing you there.
Do you have ideas for creating new habits or changing detrimental ones? Drop them in the comment box, we’d love to hear from you.
Andrea
