What “Good” Habits I Should be Adapting?
By: Don Wrote It
Tags: Daily Habits, Self Improvement, Habit Building, Personal Growth, Healthy Habits

So you’ve identified bad habits that you have and now you don’t know what to do. Let me try to help.

Photo by Content Pixie on Unsplash

There are two things you can do if you have no idea what habits you should be adapting.

First, I suggest you Google the habits of someone you may aspire to be like. Figure out what that person’s daily routine looks like and compare it to yours.

Next, start tackling your fears and the self-doubt that you feel may be stopping you from accomplishing your goal. Whatever area you think you’ll have a hard time excelling in should be a great starting place. This method can work even better if you reward yourself with an easy daily task immediately afterwards, such as breakfast or coffee. You can start with a small change as well to build momentum; this process can get overwhelming and that discourages many so make sure to take it slow and not take on too much at once.

You have an idea about the habits that don’t serve you now, finding habits that do will be the easy part. Execution can be hard because it requires consistency but in reality, the answer is simple. If you want to get better at a sport, practice every day, if you want to get better at art, create every day, or if you want to start/run a business take it day by day but do a little something towards it everyday.

The reason most people don’t accomplish their goals is because they start their journey with only the end goal in mind. For example, if you want to write books, you should dedicate yourself to writing the minimal amount every day. The goal is to do a little bit everyday so after a few months or years you will have produced a body of work. Setting smaller goals is the best way to stay motivated because every day you have an objective to tackle and every day you can taste accomplishment in route to the big goal.

James Clear gave a great example of this in his book, “Atomic Habits”. He says if you want to become a fit person you have to go to the gym every day, but you can start by going and just hanging out in there for 15 minutes every day. The idea is that after a week you’ll think to yourself, “maybe I’ll actually work out today, I’m here every day anyways”. Then you can slowly begin to spend more time in the gym over the course of a few months and perhaps even start building a workout routine.

The goal is not the end achievement, the goal is to become the type of person capable of accomplishing whatever you would like to achieve. If you aren’t where you want to be right now, figuring out what you want to do moving forward isn’t enough. Most likely you aren’t living in a way that could produce that result without resistance.You want to make your path to your goals as easy as possible and building small habits centered on that goal is the least stressful way to do it.

Being relentless with your goal is great and you need that sometimes but for the most part you will burn out. Burning out can be very demotivating and can lead to you straying off the path.

Even while writing this, I literally just told myself, “as long as the first thing I do in the morning is write, then I have won the day”. I could have only written two sentences, but I did something and the goal for that day was accomplished so I’m motivated to do more the next day but I’m not under pressure to do any more than I did the day before. You want to start everyday with some kind of momentum because most of us start on our back foot just by waking up and subjecting ourselves to bad news on our phones.

Your biology and environment play a big role in forming good habits. If you work best at night then that’s when you need to get your most important tasks done, if you’re best in the morning then do that. Every day I wake up with my laptop next to me and already primed for what I need to write that day.

Make it convenient to do what you need to do or make it inconvenient to not do what you shouldn’t be doing. Fighting against our natural inclination to choose the path of least resistance is too much work paired with the actual energy it takes to perform a task. That’s why scrolling through our phone seems so desirable, we get to have access to loads of information and entertainment with minimal effort. Same thing applies when trying to do something we aren’t comfortable with, there’s no ease in what you’re doing so why would you continue to reinforce the behavior?

Your daily habits reinforce to your subconscious that you are who you say you are. We need proof that we are the type of person to stay consistent with certain habits because we are living life through the lens of our desired identity. Without the positive reinforcement that comes with performing daily habits it becomes more difficult to stay motivated to do it.

The first week is the hardest, once you start getting comfortable with doing a specific thing at a specific time in a specific place, clinical studies show that our body will adapt and start to expect you to perform that habit. We start to associate certain times and places with specific actions, and you can feel the anxiety of not doing that thing that you should be doing.