Unlock Your Potential: The Ultimate Guide to Building Lasting Habits
Building lasting habits can be the foundation of our success. If we have good and useful habits, we will be productive, healthy, and happy. Building these lasting habits is not that easy. We must change things in our daily lives to enable this change. But once we have built these habits, we will be thankful to ourselves forever.
Today we’ll discuss the following things:
- Goals
- Starting Small
- Routine and Triggers
- Rewards and Punishments
- Key Takeaways
Goals
Habits can help us towards our goals. So, to build habits, we must at least have some goals. Otherwise, our habits have no purpose, and then we are more likely to give up this habit. We must have a clear understanding of what we want and how we can accomplish it. An often-used method is a SMART goal, which guides us towards setting these kinds of goals. We are guided by a method that helps us set specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound goals. Once we have a clear goal, we know what to do. But for the habits, more importantly, we know why we must build a certain habit. This will help us give purpose to the habits, which increases the likelihood of not giving up on them.
Starting Small
It is important to start small with habits we want to maintain for a very long time. We must start small, because otherwise the habit will be a burden. We feel like it is an obligation to do them. Which means that the task is probably too big. For example, we want to start the habit of reading every day. We could say that from this moment on, we read every day for at least one hour. This is quite a long time, especially going from zero hours per day to one hour per day. We are likely to keep this habit for about a week; after that, we don’t want to do it anymore because it feels like an obligation. We will probably not even try it anymore. So, another failed attempt at building a habit. We could also agree with ourselves that we read five pages before going to sleep. This is much easier and will not take more than five minutes. It is easy and does not require much time. We are more likely to maintain this habit, and we accomplish our goals.
Routine and Triggers
Building a good habit can be made much easier if we create a routine or triggers that will automatically stimulate us to start doing the thing we want to make a habit of. Building a routine can be hard, but an easy way to do this is by planning things and agreeing on certain rules with ourselves. Let’s use the example of reading again. We don’t want to read before bed anymore, but we want to read after waking up. We could say that after waking up and washing myself, I’m going to read five pages. Now, every time we are washing ourselves, we will read afterwards. At a certain moment, this will happen automatically, and we have built a routine of reading after washing. To make things easier, we can create triggers. Triggers are things that remind us of or stimulate us to do the thing we want to make a habit of. So, for reading, that can be a book. If we see a book, we are reminded of reading, and we are more likely to read than if we did not see the book. So, a good trigger could be to lay down the book in the bathroom, where, after we have washed, we see the book and start reading. Another example could be the habit of drinking more water. A very simple trick to increase the likelihood of accomplishing our goal of drinking enough water daily could be to put bottles of water in every room of the house. Now, every room we enter has a bottle of water, and when we see it, we are reminded of the fact that we want to drink more water. So, we start drinking. These triggers make it even easier for us to maintain the habits we want.
Rewards and Punishments
For certain habits, it might be very useful to reward ourselves. For example, we want to build the habit of working every day on a book we want to write. Nowadays, we are distracted all the time, and we just are not able to work on it well enough. We could help to build this habit by rewarding ourselves; we could say, “After I have written one page of the book, I am allowed to watch one video on YouTube.” But the opposite can also be very useful. We can also punish ourselves for not doing these things. If we want to lose weight, for example, we must first set a well-defined goal. If we weigh 80kg now and want to lose 2kg in one month, We could agree with ourselves that if we do not accomplish this goal, we must hand in our phone to someone for one whole week. Often, the more extreme the goal, the more determined we are to accomplish our goals by using the habits we want to build. The best way to stick to these punishments is to have a responsible partner. This stimulates us so much to stick to our good habits or build new ones. Rewards and punishments can also be combined.
Key Takeaways
To build habits, we first must find the purpose of the habit by setting clear goals. Then we can start building the routines; one way of doing this is by using triggers. These help us remind and stimulate us to do certain things. A good way of sticking to our habits on more difficult days is to reward and punish ourselves. If we accomplish our goal of the day, goal of the week, or goal of the year, we can reward ourselves. If we do not accomplish our goals, we must have a punishment. Choose a punishment that is hard enough that it will make you afraid of not accomplishing the goal. Disclaimer: Of course, don’t go too extreme with these punishments. All these methods help us develop good habits that will build a foundation of success in our lives.
What are your best habits? And what do you do to maintain these habits? Are you building new habits now? Let me know!
Links
If you want to read more about this topic, you can follow the following links:
Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results by James Clear
10 Daily Habit for Self-Improvement (maxwagenaar.net)
What Does It Really Take to Build a New Habit? (hbr.org)
50 Good Habits to Help Spur Your Mental Well-Being (betterup.com)
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