How to Develop Good Habits

40 Shares

Habits are not hard to develop if you know how to do it right. It just takes a bit of mental power and a little repetition. Read on to learn how to develop good habits.

Lately, I’ve been obsessed with the science behind developing good habits. There are so many ways to rewire your brain in order to start doing more and more stuff out of habit. You’d be as surprised as I was to learn that some habits can be created in just one second! I’ve been pouring over books, podcasts and YouTube videos, and I’ve collected a nice number of habits in a matter of a few days.

Now that my routine has changed because I graduated college, I had to decide what habits I needed to form. I slacked off for a couple weeks (months, actually) but now I need to get myself in order. Having no structure in my life lead me to get really irritated with myself. I’m a person that likes structure. I know that going to school and having to follow a schedule definitely helped. However, now that school is over, there is no one to boss me around.

That means I had to find a way to give my life structure, all by myself.

As a side note, I have written about studying quite a bit. If you would like to create some good study habits, check out the posts below:

I’ve poured over content designed to help me develop good habits. I’m proud to report that I think I’ve hacked the habit system. Keep reading to find out how I’ve learned to develop good habits.

5 Ways to Develop Good Habits

Creating a routine with good habits takes a while to perfect with these 5 strategies you will be able to develop good habits in no time!

1 | Get the deciding out of the way

The thing about trying to develop good habits is that you need to exert immense amounts of will power to get you moving. You hem and haw about how you don’t really want to exercise, for example. A habit is something that you don’t really need to decide about every single day. You decided once, and you kept at it, because deciding once was powerful enough. Don’t give yourself leeway to dodge an activity. This is a great tip to use to develop some really good habits like exercising. Get the deciding out of the way. Tell yourself that you will exercise every day at 9am in the morning after you wake up; no buts. This will help you to actually stick to it.

2 | Try 5 minutes

This step is a way to fool the brain. You can tell yourself, hey let’s do only 5 minutes of reading today, that will be so easy! Chances are, you will end up reading for more than 5 minutes. This tip for developing good habits can also guilt you into doing more. You feel like you might as well go all in if you’re going to start. It’s the perfect way to develop a habit every day.

3 | Go slow

Going all in might be a bad idea. Rushing into tasks with a lot gusto can lead you to crash. That’s why you need to break your habit down into sizeable chunks. It’s always a good idea to be slow and steady. It helps you to stay motivated. Make a decision to break your task into smaller chunks, and stick to the scheduling of those tasks. This will make it easier to stick to your habits.

4 | Get rid of bad habits

This step seems a bit counter intuitive, doesn’t it? However, I know from pouring over James Clear’s book Atomic Habits and podcasts with him that bad habits are usually a sign of something deeper. Your bad habits have a root cause. Something bad happened to you and you try to cope with it using these bad habits. Almost all bad habits have an origin with something that makes you feel sad or angry—negative feelings. When you pinpoint the cause of why you do something like smoking or self harm, it’s going to bring so much clarity. From here, you should realize that these bad habits need some form of coping. You should find a substitute for the bad habit. This can be in form of a good habit you are trying to cultivate. Whenever you get triggered by that negative event in your life, you will need to cope, so cope with a more productive habit from now on.

5 | One thing at a time

Let’s say you want to exercise. In order to do that, you need to get your workout outfit on. That’s the first step to start exercising. Put all your effort into that one thing, instead of focusing on how much the actual exercising is going to suck. When you focus on only one task at a time, developing good habits gets very easy. Doing the dishes? Get your apron on. You might fail to get to the actual work, but that’s alright. You can always keep building on your tasks little by little.

Pin40

40 Shares