“Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.” — Benjamin Franklin
It seems cruel how hard it can be to instil good habits, and how easily they can slip. When with bad habits, precisely the opposite is true.
How often have you decided that today is the day you’ll start a new habit, determined to make it stick? You WILL exercise more, read more books, have more breaks…
Before you know it, a particularly busy week has meant you’ve broken your desired habit. You’re left convinced that if you only had more discipline, things would be different.
Sound familiar?
The Solution
The good news is, you don’t really need discipline or motivation to sustain good habits. Instead, you need to change your approach to habit formation. If you feel you’ve ‘failed’ to form and maintain a positive habit in the past, realise that it was not because of your lack of discipline. It was simply because you didn’t use the right formula.
Below is the formula for successful habit creation, and an example of how to use it. This is based on the fabulous work of B.J. Fogg, a Stanford behavioural scientist.
Step 1: Decide on Your Goal and the Specific Habit You’d Like to Create
Example: If you want to exercise more, let’s make that specific and work towards creating a daily habit of exercising for 20 minutes on an exercise bike. It really helps at this point to consider why this goal is important to you. You may wish to visualise the benefits the habit would give you.
Step 2: Decide the Smallest Version of the Habit You’d Like to Create
That is important. Your job here is to consider the absolute tiniest version of the habit you would like to create. With the example we’re working towards, we may decide that just one minute on the exercise bike would work. If you wanted to go for a run every day, you may decide that the smallest version of that habit was to put on your running shoes and go outside for one minute.
Step 3: List All of Your Existing Habits
Now identify all the things you already do every day. For example, you probably wake up every morning; have a shower; get dressed; drink a glass of water; boil the kettle; prepare coffee or tea, eat breakfast; brush your teeth; eat lunch; etc. On weekdays, perhaps you also open your laptop; close your laptop; go for a walk… You see, there are loads of habits you already have. Write down as many as come to mind.
Step 4: Decide Your ‘Trigger’ Habit
You now need to choose one of your existing habits to become the cue or ‘trigger’ for your new habit. Go through your list of existing habits and note the most suitable one for you to use. Your choice will depend on the nature of the new habit you are forming. Consider when in the day you want to do your new habit. For example, if you’re going to do your daily exercise in the morning, the best trigger might be your glass of water after waking up, or perhaps brushing your teeth in the morning.
Step 5: Mentally Pair Your ‘Trigger’ with the Smallest Version of Your Desired Habit
Now you need to successfully pair (associate) your trigger habit with your new habit. Begin by rehearsing this in your mind. In our example, I would mentally rehearse my next morning:
- I imagine waking up, I imagine drinking my glass of water, I then visualise getting on my exercise bike and cycling for one minute. Remember, you are just visualising the tiniest version of your desired habit here.
Repeat this mental rehearsal at least three times: Visualise in the first person: You wake up, you drink your water, and you get on the bike. Repeat…
Step 6: Physically Pair Your ‘Trigger’ with the Smallest Version of Your Desired Habit
Now put it into practice. The next time your trigger habit occurs, immediately DO the tiniest version of your habit. In our example, the very next morning, you wake up and drink your water as usual, and then immediately get on your exercise bike and cycle for one minute.
Step 7: Track Your Success Each Time
As soon as you’ve done your new habit, record your success one way or another. You can use a spreadsheet, a tracker app, a wall chart, or your calendar.
Why This Works
- Your new habit is so tiny it will take virtually no effort. In the case above, you’re not trying to cycle 20km. You only need to cycle for one minute.
- You already have loads of habits. There are many things you are already doing without thinking (or needing discipline), and you’re simply adding something small onto one of these.
- Your brain learns by association. It won’t take long for it to learn this additional new behaviour.
- Your brain loves dopamine. As you ‘tick off’ each successful day, it will give you a sense of reward and build your ‘streak’ of success. As your streak builds, you’ll find your motivation to keep the habit going increases.
- As you establish the absolute minimum behaviour, you will only get bigger from there. Working with our example, if every day you go one minute on your bike, some days you will inevitably feel like exercising for longer. By day five, you might feel like doing 10 minutes, the following week you may notice clocking 15 minutes.
Best of luck!
