How to improve your habits?
Throughout our lives we acquire habits that shape our routine and therefore our results. Some of these habits are good and push us towards our goals, while others are bad and limit us. Around 40% of our daily activities are habits, which we don't think about, we just do. In this way, the quality of our lives is a reflection of the habits we maintain. Changing habits, however, is not easy and ending one is even more difficult.
Even so, with a lot of discipline and willpower, it is possible to make significant changes to your recurring activities and, consequently, to your life, generating good rewards not only in terms of your health and personal well-being, but also in your professional life.
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What is a habit?
A habit can be defined as the transformation of a sequence of actions into an automatic routine. I don't even need to mention some excellent habits that everyone should have, such as eating healthily, drinking plenty of water every day, exercising regularly, getting enough sleep, maintaining a pattern in your biological clock, managing your money well, organizing your time, maintaining basic hygiene, smiling more, always reading, taking time for yourself, surrounding yourself with inspiring people and many others.
When I list activities like this, it seems like a lot, but the truth is that we are a collection of various habits of different intensities and almost everything we do is due to them. Which is great, as we reduce energy expenditure by automating certain tasks, freeing up space in our minds for other matters. Our current society, however, has forced us to live more and more intensely, connected and always full of commitments and responsibilities, which makes us easily susceptible to living only on automatic without realizing the negative consequences for our health. In this way, toxic habits are reproduced and strengthened, and with each passing day it becomes more difficult to change the situation.
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The power of habit
Many people don't even realize the main habits that govern their lives. Stop for a moment and think about your routine, everything you do, the time you spend and how you do each thing. I bet you couldn't remember everything, you probably knew how to identify some macro parts, but you hardly remembered many details. In general, we don't even realize what happens to us every day, how much time we spend on each activity, how we do tasks that we could perhaps do better or even exclude for lack of need.
In the book The Power of Habit, the author Charles Duhigg talks about "master habits", which are some of the main ones in everyone's life that are capable of triggering a series of reactions in the way they organize their own lives and thus bring various indirect benefits through their application.
Tracking tools are needed both to measure and to help monitor routine habits. The habit tracker is an interesting and practical way of transforming your habits into visual data, making them easier to interpret, increasing your control over what happens in your life and even how one item influences another.
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How does the habit tracker work?
Basically, it consists of a board or calendar where you fill in every day what has happened with each item, some of which can be tracked just by whether or not you do them, such as meditation, others that need to be quantified, such as drinking water, and others that have different characteristics, such as your mood or the weather. You should choose the format that works best for you, whether it's stickers, symbols, drawings, writing or just colors, and make the caption clear.
The aim of this layout is to keep track of your habits and how you feel physically and mentally, thus making it easier for you to see patterns, make connections and consciously choose to make adjustments. Of course, you're free to use it however you like and only record actions that you want to make routine, but I suggest you go beyond just keeping track of tasks and understand what you feel, why you feel it and how you react to situations, as this is a way of getting to know yourself and taking better care of yourself.
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How do I start one?
Well, to begin with, if you don't yet have control over any aspect of your life, the ideal thing is to use the first month as an elaboration of your pattern. During the first week, using your tracker, you'll identify all the activities you do on a regular basis, from brushing your teeth, to eating sweets after lunch, to your performance at work or in school, and writing down the duration of everything you do. It may seem strange to dissect your routine like this, but believe me, it will help a lot in the end, so focus on the long term. Once you've built up an example of your week, you'll be able to see what you're happy with and what you'd like to change. Of course, just one week isn't enough of a parameter to determine your normal, so over the course of the first month, you continue the record by adding more tasks that you may have forgotten.
At the end of 4 weeks, you'll have a very realistic model, which will be your starting point. From there you need to define what you want your routine to be like in the future, i.e. you'll decide which habits you want to add, remove or polish. You can select all of them at first, but the ideal is to work on one or two at a time. Remember that there is a famous theory that after 21 consecutive days you can establish a habit and after 90 days it becomes a lifestyle. The key to this tip, therefore, is consistency! Without execution, there is no transformation.
Once you've chosen the habits you want to track (which don't necessarily have to be all of them), you need to actually list them in your tracker and define which parameters of each you're going to monitor. I've made some templates to be used virtually or printed out and filled in manually to make it easier for you! There are also several apps for this purpose, I suggest "Habits", which is one where you can add as many as you like, set which question you want to appear, if you want notification, how many days a week and it also shows various graphs and statistics, but you can play habit tracker in the store and there are lots of options. Or you can make your own in Trello.
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How to use the tracker?
For it to work properly, you really need to mark everything you've done within the scope of what you want to track. It doesn't take much time, you just need a minimum of dedication and organization. Beware of leaving it until the end of the day or the next day, as you may end up forgetting. It's important to note that the process involves ups and downs, there may be days when you don't manage to achieve what you set out to do, so be honest and don't mark the goal as completed.
Another positive point of this technique is that at the end of the month you can clearly see which habits are better and which need more attention. The 21-day theory is also an average. There are people who can absorb an activity into their routine more easily, just as there are tasks that are more complicated to automate. So respect your time, think that in the long run it's better to have done something positive for two days than for none, for example having slept for 8 hours or having climbed the stairs or not having eaten lunch while messing around on social media. Value your achievements on the gratitude map!
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How to change habits?
It's not easy, I won't lie, but it is possible. There are a few tips that will help. The first stage you've already done, identifying the habit, the second consists of finding the causes of this habit, as well as the triggers that set it off and the rewards obtained. Example: you always open Instagram when brushing your teeth and waste a lot of time. The most obvious trigger is the act of brushing your teeth, and this is something you won't be able to eliminate from your routine, the most likely cause is the desire for a break or a distraction and perhaps you sabotage yourself because you justify that brushing your teeth is essential and that it's "spare" time since it doesn't require much effort.
According to Charles Duhigg, a habit is made up of three stages: an initial cue, an action and a final retribution. Thus, the best way to end a habit is to replace it with another, because the brain uses the same stimulus it already knows to perform another activity. So, to begin with, find another action that provides the same reward, perhaps making faces in the mirror or performing a funny dance will fulfill your need for relaxation. At the same time, you also need to make the ingrained habit more difficult, the famous 20s friction technique, make it take at least 20 seconds longer for you to perform the habitual action. For example, not taking your cell phone into the bathroom is the simplest way, but there are also apps that block you from using your cell phone, or specific apps, for a predetermined amount of time.
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How to create a habit?
The same rule applies to creating a new habit: make the desired activity at least 20 seconds easier. Keep water within your reach if you want to drink more throughout the day, and have your gym clothes ready the day before if you want to make it easier to go. Some habits may also require a certain amount of training beforehand, for example counting to 10 in a stressful situation before starting an argument or doing diaphragmatic breathing to calm down in a moment of anxiety. This is because these are highly emotion-related activities that provoke a very strong automatic response, so you need to create another repertoire and condition yourself outside of the circumstance, so that when it actually happens, you have an easy option other than your typical one. This way, your prefrontal cortex, your system 2, will have another attitude suggestion instead of just having a reaction from the limbic system, or system 1, but that's a conversation for another text.
It sounds simple when you put it like that, but the reality is quite different, so don't give up, do your tracking and follow your progress little by little. I'm sure that at the end of a month, when you see your schedule well colored and filled in, or at the end of a year, when you see many of your goals achieved, the feeling of mastery will be strong and all the effort expended will have been worth it. Trust me, start today, because every day counts!
PS: I have to say that routines and habits are not things that have to be followed to the letter! It's not because you've stopped showering for a day that you don't have the habit of showering, that's another benefit of the habit tracker, it gives you a holistic view, where one failure isn't so relevant and motivates you to continue your efforts. Do you think it's worth a try?
