Building better habits
Building habits
Your habit statement-
“I am 90-100% confident I will (this will be your action) when (this will be your trigger or the situation that will remind you to ask here) for the next 7 days”.
For example- “I am 90-100% confident that I will eat one portion of fruit (your action) at lunch (your trigger) in order to improve the quality of my diet.
We shouldn’t look to implement more than 1-3 habits at a time as if we try to do too much more than that then we dilute our attention down too much and the chances of us implementing them become reduced so focus on 1-3 key habits.
Getting it just right
You have to be sure that you can stick to the habit. You have to be 90-100% sure.
Being too optimistic sometimes may make you fail to implement the habit frequently enough to reinforce the habit loop, i.e the loop of a trigger, action, reward and then the loop begins again.
For example- If you are starting off working out and saying “I will run 10 miles tomorrow”, well maybe being this optimistic can be setting yourself to fail. This is why you need to make the habit so easy that it feels impossible to fail. Once you start doing something you probably do more of it but it’s that initiation of it that’s the hardest part so getting that ball rolling.
The frequency- ‘I will eat vegetables at 2 meals’, well you could change it to ‘I will eat vegetables at 1 meal’ instead.
The intensity- Examples of what I mean by changing the intensity are as follows-
‘I will eat 200g of vegetables’, instead you could say ‘I will eat 150g of vegetables’.
Another example is:
‘I will do 30 sit-ups’, instead you could say ‘I will do 10 sit-ups’ instead.
The units- If you are struggling to eat a whole portion of vegetables at each meal then you could bring it down to 1 meal, if one is still too much then you could bring it down to 1 mouthful of vegetables instead, as if you are a person who doesn’t normally eat vegetables then a mouthful is still good as at least it is something, it’s a little step in the right direction.
Identifying triggers
Triggers start the habit and the habit loop. Keep going back onto existing triggers and use your current routine to help build new habits.
You can keep track of all of this.
A task you can do to do this is:
To list two columns, then you are going to list everything you do throughout your day, e.g you clean your teeth or you go to work etc, you will do this in the first column.
This task will take you about 5-10 minutes. In the column next to it you are going to write down all of the things that happen to you during the day, e.g- the postman delivers your post to the house etc.
After you have done this you are going to match the trigger from these two columns that best fits your new habit.
For example: there is no point in saying ‘I’m going to eat a portion of fruit on the way to work whilst I’m on the train’, as you may not have any fruit at home to take with you to have whilst you’re on the train.
There also may not be a convenience shop at the train station or near there to pick up some fruit from and you may be in a rush to get to work so sometimes things don’t go exactly to plan because sometimes these things happen in life but this is okay.
So with these things that you have written in the columns you are going to match the best one to the habit.
Your table should look similar to this-
So above are a few examples but your table will be filled in as you would have written more in yours than I have in mine.
Moving on from the table now.
I am 90-100% certain that I will meditate for 10 minutes (your action) when I boil the kettle (your trigger) every morning for the next 7 mornings in order to deal better with stress (your outcome) and try to relax. This is just an example but this can be personalisable to you.
Hot triggers and cold triggers
Hot triggers are ones that can be acted on right away to perform a habit.
Cold triggers are something that does trigger you but you can’t implement your habit straight away.
Here’s a cold trigger
Example: ‘I will meditate as soon as I get on the train’.
Well, actually you may not be able to have a sit down as there may not be any seats available on the train whilst you’re on your way to work so you might have to wait until you get a seat as that may be further down the line as you may get a seat later on so this is an example of a cold trigger. Therefore this is something that can trigger you but you can’t implement your habit straight away so we’re going to look to try to find hot triggers where as soon as you see it and as soon as something initiates it you can go and do it.
If you can’t find one that’s already within your day you can create ones pretty easily such as setting reminders on your phone for your habits or you could write them on post-it notes to remind yourself. You could put them around your house like on your fridge or if you have a notice board you could pin it up on there in your house such as by putting a post-it note on your fridge that says ‘meditate for 10 minutes.
This will help as it has been shown that writing your intentions down increases your likelihood of following through 2-3 times.
Write it down, track and reflect
Write it down: Use a piece of paper that you have written your habit on and keep it in your pocket so that you can keep looking at it and for it to remind you.
Track it: Keep a score of how many days this current week that you perform that habit and you could have a calendar, then every day that you implement your habit you can tick it off each day on your calendar as you need to know each day of how many days of that week that you’re fulfilling that habit because if you’re not fulfilling it between 90-100% of the time then we’ve probably overestimated our ability to fulfil that habit a little bit and so it might need to be tweaked and personalised.
Reflect on it: 3-7 days per week at the end of the day ask yourself these things:
What did I do well? (Identify the positive behaviours that moved you closer to your goal)
What did I learn? (If things went wrong and you had a bad day then what can we learn from it and how can we prevent it from happening again)
It is fine to have a bad day but what can we learn from in order to prevent it from happening in the future? This is what you should ask yourself so you are now reflecting on it.
E.g. Identify why you went off your plan or why you didn’t exercise.
Remember that you win or you learn. By implementing habits for long term behaviour change you are helping yourself to get to your goals and where you would like to be.