It’s all too easy to pick up a bad habit, but why is it so difficult to form good ones? The answer is related to human psychology. “Bad habits” typically come with rapid reinforcement or gratification. That time you procrastinated on an important project may have caused stress at the time, but it also immediately relieved you of effort and hard work. With good habits, on the other hand, we usually have to wait for the reward, which makes it harder to train our brains. Luckily, this doesn’t necessarily mean we’re doomed to stick with bad habits, there are ways to change our behaviour and establish new habits that improve our health, personal lives, and work. Let’s take a look.
Identify your habits
Habits are defined as the activities or behaviours that we do regularly without much thought or intention. For example, brushing your teeth is a very common (and good) habit that most of us do automatically, or without much thought and debate. Other habits, however, can have a negative impact on the quality of our lives. In order to form good habits, it is important to first recognize other habits that might be standing in your way. Pay attention to when a bad habit occurs and try to figure out what could be triggering it—what you’re feeling, what you’re telling yourself, and even what you’re doing. Understanding your existing habits will be the first step to breaking bad habits and building new habits.
Reward yourself
If the new habit you want to form doesn’t come with its own immediate gratification, make the habit forming process easier on yourself by implementing your own reward system. According to Thomas Rutledge PhD in Psychology Today, adding external reinforcement where none exists prior can help ease the adoption of new habits. In short: it will be easier to form a good habit if you make positive associations. Take exercising, for example. Pursuing an activity or sport you enjoy doing, or making exercise a social event can encourage you to integrate exercise into your daily routine and ultimately form a habit of it.
Start small
Nothing is less conducive to forming new habits than making those habits too ambitious, which can make you feel like you’re being set up to fail. Let’s be real: it’s much easier to make small or incremental changes to our day-to-day lives than to overhaul our routines completely. That’s why it’s important to start small when pursuing new habits. For example, if you want to read more, you might fail if your initial plan is to go from no daily reading to an hour a day. Instead, make a habit of reading for 5 or 10 minutes a day—maybe it’s first thing in the morning alongside your coffee or right before you turn out the light to sleep. Once you’re in the groove of opening up a book or turning on your ereader every day, you can begin to dedicate more time to it and it will become a habit.
Give yourself cues
There are parallels between creating a habit and goal setting. Most notably, making your new habits or goal as specific as possible. With goal setting, this can look like “reach out to 3 potential clients every week” instead of simply “find new clients”. With habit forming, it’s important to start small and to give yourself specific cues. You are more likely to create a habit of exercising by setting the specific goal of “doing 10 jumping jacks” while the coffee brews in the morning rather than simply planning to “exercise more”. In other words, tie your new habit to specific cues or habits you already have. And make sure they are specific and not vague, it’s easier to convince yourself that it’s too difficult if it seems larger or more complicated than it is.
Make room for slip ups
Whether you’re looking to break a bad habit or forming some new habits, it’s important to recognize that slip ups can happen. By accepting this ahead of time, any stumbles you may experience along the way will have less of a chance of derailing your efforts entirely. If your goal was to make a habit of writing every day and you miss a day—whether for lack of motivation or time—cut yourself some slack. Get past the fact that you missed a day, and focus on the next day. Expert on habit formation and author, James Clear suggests adopting the mindset of “never missing twice” to help get yourself back on track when you do slip.
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Ultimately, forming new habits is key to improving the quality of our lives—both personal and professional. And it’s worth noting that even good personal habits can have ripple effects into our professional lives. No one is saying it’s easy, but these tips can help you find success in building new habits. For more helpful advice on improving time management and more, head to our Skillpack Blog.
