Building Habits

DAY 4

So yesterday I made a post about the best habits to acquire during your youth. Today I will focus on actually building your habits. As I discussed yesterday, habits sculpt your life. Therefore it is important to build positive habits to get you to success. Realise that your actions and experiences define who you are. The small steps you take everyday need to lead you upwards toward your goals for you to achieve success. People don't achieve success over night, it takes time and discipline to get from point A to point B.

Dustin Moskovitz, one of the co-founders of Facebook, was once asked how he felt about Facebook being an "overnight success". He phrased his answer in this fashion: “If by ‘overnight success’ you mean staying up and coding all night, every night for six years straight, then it felt really tiring and stressful.” He had a goal in mind and he slowly climbed towards it. If you have a goal you want to achieve, you need to take the time and discipline to develop habits that direct you towards the goal.

Transforming your habits is not an easy thing to do. It's one of the things that separates people who are successful and the rest of the flock. It's really hard to stay on track with your habits if you are just starting. Don't be discouraged though, there are ways to make it less hard and maybe even easy. Here are 3 extremely helpful tips that I find useful for transforming habits.

1. Have a Big Goal, and Work Towards It Slowly

Don't expect so much from yourself when you first start your habit. Do a minimum amount of work for the day and that work would slowly build up. Doing too much at the get go will cause you to burn out. You need to adjust to change before increasing the intensity of the task. If you start with a habit that was too intense and you weren't prepared or disciplined enough you won't follow through with it. Start with a small manageable task then eventually move on to tasks that require a bit more management.

Let's say you want to lose weight and you decide to cut carbs cold turkey. In a couple days or a week you would probably be eating carbs again because your mind and body can't handle it. Now let's say you decreased the carb content in your food over time. You still eat less than you normally did, but you are conditioning your body and mind as well. Each time you cut it your mind would be saying "it's just a little bit less than before" until eventually it's gone from your diet, and your body would be okay with that. Habits should be gradually eased into your life like this!

One main reason why people start a habit and quit shortly after is because they are expecting too much from their work. A lot of effort may be put in, but the results just weren't worth the effort for them. When you start with smaller tasks with the mindset of just building a habit it becomes a lot easier. By letting your habit develop you make it part of your daily routine to work on your goal. Results will eventually show, success isn't for the impatient.

2. Visualise the Processes

A research study from UCLA concluded that visualising helps in achieving our goals. Commonly people visualise the end result of the goal, but research nowadays show that dreaming too much about your end result reduces your motivation towards the goal. 

If we don't fantasise about the goal then what do we fantasise about? We should fantasise about the process of achieving the goal. Visualising the steps it takes to reach the goal works because it helps you plan and it reduces your anxiety towards tackling the goal. It motivates you to do whats needed to reach the goal and therefore it helps you create habits. Visualise each step and process of starting your habit and you'll feel more relaxed about making life changes like these.

3. Program Your Actions

Laying down action chains and mechanisms for your daily routine is really helpful towards sticking with it. Have a goal in mind and add your habit to a process through the "if...then..." formula. Lets say you wanted to keep your room tidy as a goal and a portion of the mess is clothes. A simple habit program for dealing with this is: "if  I take off my jacket then I need to hang it up". Another simple example could be: "if I take off my clothes then I'll throw them in the laundry bin or fold them for later if they are clean". By having context to what you're doing then it's easier to commit to the task because you aren't relying on sheer willpower.