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You’re Getting to be a Habit with Me
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21 days, two years from now, on the spot -- no matter what the process or its duration, old habits can be expunged and new ones adopted
3 Ways to Break Old Habits and Make New Habits Stick
“We’ve all had a bad habit of some sort – cracking knuckles, biting fingernails, spending money we don't have, speaking over other people, you name it. I hope I’m not getting too personal…. A habit can become almost involuntary and can be very frustrating if it’s one you don’t want. Although there is no magic formula for breaking a habit, there are ways to overcome them and replace these actions with better habits. Yes, it comes down to change and change is hard; but with a little work, you can reprogram your mind to do anything you set out to do.
Breaking Bad Habits
1. Address the Reason WHY You Need to Stop
Why is your habit so bad anyway? Until you actually come up with the reason and acknowledge the impact of your habit, you’ll never get over it.
Do you have a habit of checking your email too much? Your reason to stop may be that it’s taking too much time away from your family. Spending too much money? Your reason to stop is because your finances are suffering and you just can’t ‘get ahead.’ Be honest with yourself and think about what is being affected by the habit.
Once you know why you need to stop, you can work on ways to replace the habit with better things. Try to identify activities that will make you more productive or help you practice self-control. An example would be to set aside 3 ten-minute blocks at night to check your email. This lets you stay in control of your email – not the other way around. If you want to break the vending machine habit, try bringing pre-made snacks to work. You’ll soon overcome the temptation to spend a few dollars just by planning ahead.
3. Make the Decision
You can talk about making a change all you want, but nothing happens until you start. The choice to start doing something differently needs to be a conscious decision that you believe in – otherwise, it won’t stick. Choosing the substitute over your bad habit will put you on your way to better habits – but you’re not done yet…
Building Good Habits
1. Get Focused
If you want to build good habits, you need to have a strong will and narrowed focus. Trying to start too many new habits will only result in a bunch of inconsistent tasks. Start with one new habit at a time and make it a priority to master it before moving on to your next goal.
2. Stay Organized
Your efforts will be much more fruitful if you write down your goals and objectives before starting. Keep it simple and make targets that are achievable. Try making milestones that you can track over a period of time. An example would be: “I will drink 4 glasses of water a day for a week and move to 5 glasses next week.” Create a chart and keep track of your progress.
3. Be Consistent
Habits aren’t broken overnight; nor are they started in a day. Through consistent action, you can add a great habit to your life that can literally make your life better!
One of the ways you can stay committed is through accountability. (yes, the “A” word) Announce your new goal to a few friends or write a $100 check to someone you trust with instruction to cash it if you don’t keep your word.
You’ve heard it said that a new habit takes 21 days of consistent action in order to stick. Whether that’s true or not, I challenge you to start and commit to your goal no matter how long it takes. The bottom line is that it requires a concentrated effort and determination to change, but I’m confident you can do it!”
Nourish Yourself
(excerpted from: http://www.realtime.net/anr/10eattip.html)
Some tips to engrain good eating habits
- Balance your food choices over time. Not every food has to be "perfect." When eating a food high in fat, salt or sugar, select other foods that are low in these ingredients. If you miss out on any food group one day, make up for it the next. Your food choices over several days should fit together into a healthy pattern.
- Know your diet pitfalls. To improve your eating habits, you first have to know what's wrong with them. Write down everything you eat for three days. Then check your list according to the rest of these tips. Do you add a lot of butter, creamy sauces or salad dressings? Rather than eliminating these foods, just cut back your portions. Are you getting enough fruits and vegetables? If not, you may be missing out on vital nutrients.
- Make changes gradually. Just as there are no "superfoods" or easy answers to a healthy diet, don't expect to totally revamp your eating habits overnight. Changing too much, too fast can get in the way of success. Begin to remedy excesses or deficiencies with modest changes that can add up to positive, lifelong eating habits. For instance, if you don't like the taste of skim milk, try low-fat. Eventually you may find you like skim, too.
- Remember, foods are not good or bad. Select foods based on your total eating patterns, not whether any individual food is "good" or "bad." Don't feel guilty if you love foods such as apple pie, potato chips, candy bars or ice cream. Eat them in moderation, and choose other foods to provide the balance and variety that are vital to good health.
Get Up & Go!
From Fitness Health Zone http://www.fitnesshealthzone.com/fitness/a-new-routine-too-hard-its-not/
"When you think about it, it all really boils down to giving up half an hour of sleep or TV or some other dispensable activity for fitting in a work out. It depends upon priorities really.
When you prioritize things, do you want that half hour of sleep in the early morning more than a fit, toned healthy body with more energy and get up and go? It could be something as simple as getting up just half an hour early, doing about 5 minutes of warm up, followed by 20 minutes of working out, and then end with some stretches.
The rest of the day can follow as usual, and one is sure to find a marked increase in energy levels and a feeling of strength and vitality; a vast improvement upon before!”
You already have them all, you just need to dust them off and use them.. but here is a gentle ‘reminder’ to get you started (http://lifehacker.com/111265/how-to-install-a-new-habit):
"During the time before the action becomes a habit (perhaps the first few weeks) you will need to use external triggers or reminders. Make it easy to remember what you are trying to do. Alarms, notes, friends to call you, rubber bands on your wrist, padlocks or obstacles. Rituals support remembering - do it in the same place, same time, same surroundings if possible for the first few weeks.”
Tips
Start good habits at the top of the day with these handy hints from Lifehacker.com: http://lifehacker.com/5537478/top-10-ways-to-upgrade-your-morning-routine
Top 10 Ways to Upgrade Your Morning Routine
10. Save the Morning for Thinking
The morning tends to have a quieter, more contemplative feel to it. Take advantage of it, as one CEO recommends, by following poet William Blake's advice to divide up your day: "Think in the morning, act in the noon, read in the evening, and sleep at night." Even if your job's more about cranking than managing and contemplating, you can use the mornings where you're not on tight deadline to think over problems, consider future challenges, and give your tasks more mindful attention than they'll get when everyone else gets in and starts grabbing for your attention.
9. Track Your A.M. Habits
Why are you always late to work or school? It's not because the Earth randomly spins faster on certain days. There's a good chance you've given yourself an arbitrary time span, like an hour, rather than see what your morning really requires. The Unclutterer blog suggests a system for tracking and streamlining your routine, and determining what wild cards can throw you off-balance. Got a rough list of necessities? Make a list, follow it, then revise it—but give yourself a couple days to see what really works for you. Yeah, it feels geeky to use a timer and spreadsheet walking around your kitchen in the morning, but once it becomes habit, you can put down the pencil and get on with life. 8. Put Your Kids on an Itinerary
You may be master of your morning, but your smaller subjects can quickly cause it to go haywire. Gretchen Rubin, blogging at The Happiness Project, suggests a deadline-oriented, precise routine for your kids to eliminate the dreaded "One more minute!" It takes some time and consistency to enforce, but soon enough, your children will be able to actually relax in the morning, if they know they're ahead of their specific breakfast/bathroom/homework-roundup routines.
7. Eat for Better Sleep
The simple way to realign your energy throughout your day is to eat less at night, saving the big meals for when you're up and running. If the problem is that you're just not falling asleep, plan your dinners and later snacks around foods that contribute to a good night's sleep, like turkey, bananas, honey, potatoes, almonds, and others.
6. Choose Your Most Important Task Over Email
Whatever your boss sent out at 5:45 p.m. last night likely isn't as important as the most important thing you need to work on this morning. The way most of us handle our mornings, though, you wouldn't know it. If you want to look back on your morning and not feel like it disappeared, take control of your workday by prioritizing one task—just one thing you really need to do—and put off opening your inbox for one hour. Seems sacrilegious, but if you asked your boss or clients which was more important, their answer might not surprise you.
5. Trade Coffee Jolts for Smaller Perk-Ups
When it comes to caffeine, a tall cup of coffee is a sledgehammer. If you're going to use caffeine to boost your morning energy, there are real benefits to spacing out smaller caffeine boosts. A 12-ounce thermos with a 3-4 ounce mug in the lid is just about perfect, as reader jopasm tells us, as you can space out your java throughout the morning and never quite get that shaky-leg feeling. Switching to tea or diet soda, if you can stomach it, also makes for a slower-dose substitute.
4. Wake Up Without Any CaffeineBlogger Scott Young, waking up at 5:30 every morning, had to find a way to convince his mind and body that it was actually time to get up. He's not a caffeine person, so he relied on other cues and tactics to wake up. Filling the room with light, tricking himself into committing to "just" 10 minutes of staying awake, doing his creative work early in the morning, and a bit of exercise worked for him. The real secret, he writes, is in getting enough sleep that mornings just feel like a soft transition from sleep, but his other strategies can help when that basic foundation fails.
3. Set a Morning Prep Reminder the Night Before
Whether it's your watch, your cellphone, or a microwave reminder, set something in your home to beep at a certain time every night. When that beep goes off, around 10 p.m., for instance, it means you should drop what you're doing and spend just a bit of time preparing for your morning, while you're actually awake. LifeClever calls it the 10 O'Clock Rule, and suggests a few things we can all do to semi-automate our mornings: set out your clothes, pocket contents, and shoes, grind coffee, check your calendar for events and reminders, and packing anything you're bound to forget into your bag. It's a night person's best hedge against the morning, and a morning person's ticket to spending their energy on more exciting things.
2. Crank Out Some Push-Ups
When a loud noise wakes you up, you might notice you're not quite so groggy and annoyed as wide-awake and alert. Cranking out push-ups first thing in the morning can provide some of that same kind of bio-feedback that tells your body it's time to get up and do something, something maybe even related to caveman-instinct survival. Do as many push-ups as you can (or as many feel comfortable, without sore arms), wait 30 seconds, then repeat two more times. Personal trainer Dan Boyle swears by it, and some of our commenters find it reliable, too.
1. Know Your Peak Performance Times
Different people find their energy, and inspiration arriving at different times, but not everybody can rearrange their work schedule. If that sounds like you, you can benefit from learning the peak times for early-risers and night owls, or learning your own energy schedule. If you're a data hound who likes specifics, you can do more than deal in generalities of morning, afternoon, and evening—you can map and graph your daily ups and downs.
Tweak
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| Very BAD Habit |
read more in top 10 ways to establish new habits – without discipline: http://goodlifezen.com/2009/05/04/top-ten-way-to-establish-new-habits-without-discipline/
18 Tricks to Make New Habits Stick: http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/18-tricks-to-make-new-habits-stick.html
An interesting take on How to Find Time for New Habits: http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/how-to-find-time-for-new-habits/
Question
You already know what habits you need to change. But if you could start with just ONE today, what would it be?
Thought
“I say that habit's but a long practice, friend, and this becomes men's nature in the end." - Aristotle
"Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.” - Jim Ryun
"Sow a thought, and you reap an act;/ Sow an act, and you reap a habit;/ Sow a habit, and you reap a character;/ Sow a character, and you reap a destiny.” - Charles Reader
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| Not quite what we meant in the way of a Good New Habit |
on habits that go too far:
- Nearly 14 million American adults are alcohol abusers or alcoholics at any given time, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
- 22 million Americans are addicted to illegal and/or prescription drugs, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
- An estimated one in three of all dieters develop compulsive dieting attitudes and behaviors. (Anne Collins, Eating Disorders Statistics on Anorexia, Bulimia and Binge Eating Disorder)
- The average TV set is on for eight hours and 14 minutes a day in U.S. homes, according to Nielsen Media Research.
- A British study found that 12 percent of 7,000 video gamers polled met the addictive behavior criteria established by the World Health Organization.
- 40 percent of American families spend more than they earn each year.
Treat
Determine a treat that is not counterproductive but that will keep you motivated. I am the most camera-shy person in the world, so I think I may make having a photo taken of me be a goal and treat wrapped into one. It would be a lovely way to chronicle my progress. But until then, here are some ideas on coming up with your own rewards: Reward Yourself: Celebrating Behavior Change: (http://www.valueoptions.com/spotlight_heart/html/pdfs/Articles/English/change_management/managing_change_reward_yourself_celebrating_behavioral_change.pdf)
Two Simple Ways to Form New Habits Without Really Trying: http://zenhabits.net/two-simple-ways-to-form-new-habits-without-really-trying/
How to Establish New Habits the No-Sweat Way: http://zenhabits.net/how-to-establish-new-habits-the-no-sweat-way/
Developing and Establishing Good Habits: http://www.yvettewrites.com/yvettes-blog/8-organization/33-developing-and-establishing-habits.html
Mythbusting: Are New Habits Established in 21 Days? http://blog.neatandsimple.com/2007/06/mythbusting_new.html#
In Sum
Based on the sheer volume of writing on this subject it is clear you can change your habits... habitually
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