how habits work

5 Ways To Make New Habits Stick

Wouldn’t it be great if everything in your life was completely automated? You would no longer have to remember to get up and go to work or do your daily chores. You would exercise regularly and eat the healthiest things.

But unfortunately, life doesn’t work that way and you have to be involved in the process.

There is something that you can do to make your life a lot easier and a lot more rewarding though. That is to form some good habits so that you tend to do the most important things in your life automatically.

Sounds good doesn’t it? Yes it does but forming new good habits requires a lot of time, effort and patience.

If you don’t go about it the right way then your new habits will not stick. In this article we will show you ways that you can make your new habits stick.

Start In A Simple Way

A lot of people fall into the trap of trying to totally change their lives in a single day.

It doesn’t work like that. When you are committed to forming new good habits in your life you will be very motivated at first but it is easy to lose your motivation if you are trying to make too many changes.

Start off with small changes and then build from these.

Make A 90 Day Commitment

You will need to run a routine for at least 21 days to become comfortable with the change.

To turn this into an automatic habit will require an average of 66 days.

So ,we recommend that you make a 90 day commitment to your new habit. 90 days is not a long time in the scheme of things and it will pass quickly.

The Importance Of Daily Routines

The best way to make a new habit stick is to be consistent with it. You want to create a new daily routine which includes your new habit.

So, if the new habit you want to form is regular exercise then participate in some form of exercise every day.

Don’t go crazy here. You do not want to join a gym and commit to completing a full workout each day.

This is a disaster waiting to happen. Find a form of exercise that is beneficial that you can easily do at home. Gradually migrate to going to the gym a few times a week.

Create A Reminder System

It is important that you never lose sight of why you are forming a new habit.

The stronger your reason for creating the new habit in your life the better.

So, create a reminder system that will always remind you of why you are putting in this additional effort and making sacrifices.

Write down your reason for making the change and make this strong for example.

Remove Things That Will Tempt You Back Into Bad Ways

Forming a new habit is a tough thing to do and you will help yourself enormously if you remove temptations that could push you back into your bad habits.

If you are changing your diet to a healthy eating plan then get rid of all those forbidden foods from your kitchen for example.

Making your new habits stick is not easy so give yourself all of the help that you need by following these tips.

These are not difficult things to implement in your life and they will make the difference between success and failure.

Of course, when we create new habits, we want them to ones that are positive and empower us.

But sometimes we acquire bad habits and need to break free of them but how do you do that?

The Best 5 Ways To Break Bad Habits

Most people have attempted to break bad habits in their life before but found the process so difficult that they gave up and resigned themselves to accepting the bad habit. This is not a place that you want to be in.

You need to break bad habits using the best techniques. It doesn’t matter if you eat too much junk food, spend too much money on things that are not important or procrastinate too much; you can break these bad habits when you know how to do it properly.

So, let’s look at 5 of the best ways to break your bad habits.

Breaking a bad habit is one of the most liberating things that you can do in your life. So please read on and then start putting what you learn into practice.

Make Indulging In Your Bad Habit Painful!

People will usually do more to avoid pain than they will to gain pleasure. So, with this in mind it is a good idea to create a pain situation related to your bad habits.

If you eat too much junk food, then fine yourself each time you visit the hamburger joint. Make this significant such as $20 that you give to your spouse or children when you do this.

Another thing that you can do is to engage in a wager with someone over your bad habit. Make it a large enough wager so that it will be really painful for you if you have to pay it out.

You do not have to use money for this pain. Giving up something that you love can be just as painful if not more. The wager could be over your new video game console for example.

What Triggers Your Bad Habit?

You need to understand what kicks off your bad habit in order to break it. This is called a trigger and it can be one thing or several different things.

Most of us indulge in our bad habits without even thinking about it. We then tend to believe that we can never break the habit because it is automatic.

It is not automatic it just happens very quickly so you think that it is. So, when you next crave your bad habit identify what caused this craving.

The more that you know about your bad habits the more likely you are to break them.

Remind Yourself

You may have the very best intentions to break a bad habit but if you experience a sudden drop in your willpower then you can find yourself easily indulging again.

In order to avoid this, we recommend that you place reminders around you that you are on a mission to break a bad habit.

This will help you to refocus and continue with your good work.

Change Your Environment

As we have seen above, a lot of bad habits are triggered from being in a certain place or seeing the same things over and over.

To avoid these triggers, you can make some small changes to your environment. They don’t need to be massive to make a difference

If the route you take to work stresses you about because of the traffic and makes you want a cigarette then try different routes.

Take Small Steps

You need patience and persistence to break bad habits. Trying to make massive changes in your life all at once is going to be really challenging for you.

It is better to take smaller steps and introduce smaller changes over time that lead to the eventual big change.

You really need to work on building good habits and to do that you will need to develop a strong success mindset and that is easier than you think; you may just need a few pointers to help you out along the way.

To that end, please check out the featured resource below as it features a free report that will help you to develop a strong mindset that can help propel you into the success you deserve. Download, read it and take action 😊

The Science Of How To Form Habits

Most of us know that we have some bad habits that are standing in the way of us achieving what we want in life. We also know that we need to replace these with some empowering habits that will make the transition to a better life a lot easier.

This is all well and good but the problem is that breaking bad habits and forming new good ones is a tough thing to do. It requires dedication and effort that most people are not prepared to commit to.

If you really want to break your bad habits and form good ones that will change your life for the better then you need to understand how habits work. In this article we will look at the science behind habits so that you can understand them better and increase your chances of making a successful change in your life.

Habits Have Cues

All habits have cues. These are the things that trigger a specific habit within us. There are different categories of cues and the experts believe that they fall into five main categories which are:

Your emotional state
Specific times of the day
What you see
Where you are
The influence of others

A habit is a neurological loop in your subconscious mind. When the right cue appears it will automatically trigger the habit.

It is tough to change your response to these cues especially if you have habits that have been around for years. Most of the time we do not realize that our habits are being triggered by these cues.

There Is Always A Routine

As soon as you experience the right cue then you will go through a routine that means you will exhibit certain behavior or take specific actions. This is important because it provides you with the opportunity to replace a bad routine with a good routine.

Many psychological experts will tell you that it is far more effective to replace a bad routine with a good one than it is to attempt to totally eliminate a bad habit altogether.

This makes a lot of sense and makes the process of breaking your bad habits much easier if you replace the routine with something better. Habits have Rewards

All habits have a reward associated with them. You may not realize this but it is true. Each time you smoke a cigarette or eat junk food there is a reward attached to this. Smoking may make you feel relaxed for example. Even good habits have rewards such as cleaning your teeth makes your mouth and breath feel fresh.

You Crave Habits

Because you repeat your habits over and over you will receive your reward and then your brain will start to crave whatever the reward is. This craving strengthens the habit whether it is good or bad.

The craving is a positive thing for good habits because it makes the habit stick. On the flip side it is a negative for those bad habits because it will constantly nag at you to indulge in them.

You are now aware of the habit neurological loop that will help you to break any bad habits that you have and form new ones that are good for you. It is a matter of addressing the cues, routines and rewards to make the changes that you desire.

3 Phases Of Forming A Habit

People that are successful in life perform routines that support their success. You may have read that it takes approximately 21 days to form a new habit but there is more to it than that. A number of research studies have concluded that it actually takes people 66 days on average to form a new habit.

There is a process involved in forming new habits. It is not just a matter of doing something consistently for 66 days. If only it was that easy!

So, let’s dive further into what the three phases are to habit formation which will help you on your journey to forming the new habits that you desire.

1. Honeymoon Phase

Imagine meeting someone and then falling in love with them. The world seems a much better place after this doesn’t it? Every new day is exciting and you are prepared to do anything to make this new person in your life happy. You never want this feeling to end but in the majority of cases it does unfortunately.

Reality kicks in and things look different. You start to question whether you have made the right choice. The same can be said for forming a new habit. At the beginning you are very excited about what this new habit will do for you. You work hard at it and feel great about it.

Then suddenly you get past this honeymoon stage and things don’t look so great any more. It is now becoming a chore for you to keep your new habit going. Congratulations, you have just entered the critical stage.

2. Critical Stage

This is not called the critical phase for nothing. It is the time when reality really starts to kick in and you question whether all of the time and effort that you are spending on your new habit is really worth it.

Your motivation levels are at their lowest during this phase and if you don’t survive it then there is a real danger that your old bad habits will resurface and you will go back to your old ways.

You must successfully navigate your way through the critical phase to continue with your new habit and make it stick.

The best way to survive the critical stage is to do the following:

Be aware that you have entered the critical phase
Ask yourself the right questions to refocus and take control of your emotions
Visualize the big picture – how continuing with this new habit will change your life for the better in the future

3. Second Nature Phase

As you might expect, this phase means that your new habit has reached the stage of becoming second nature to you. This is a great place to be but you still need to be cautious here as you do not want to fall foul of these things that can put you back in the critical phase:

Getting discouraged
Having your new habit interrupted
Feeling that you have already done enough

Any one of these things can land you back in the critical stage. If you do end up back there then you need to keep fighting to get back in the second nature stage.

After that it is just a matter of carrying on until the new routine becomes an automatic habit.

You really need to work on your positive habits and to do that you will need to develop a strong success mindset and that is easier than you think; you may just need a few pointers to help you out along the way.