How to make habits stick so you could finally change your life?
How to make habits stick?
How do we form habits and how to make them a permanent part of our daily routines?
What is it that stops you from developing the essential habits you know will do you only good?
Is it a matter of discipline or motivation? Is it a matter of too many distractions or poor organization?
In this post, we will discuss what makes you give up on habits fast and how to make habits stick around for long enough, so they change your life?
“What you repeatedly do (i.e. what you spend time thinking about and doing each day) ultimately forms the person you are, the things you believe, and the personality that you portray.” James Clear, Atomic Habits
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How Do Habits work?
In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear talks about the science behind performing a habit.
The process is very simple and has four different stages:
- Cue – The cue is literally every bit of information that our brain picks up around us and predicts a reward at the end of certain behaviour.
- Craving – The next thing we experience is the craving which is our brain telling us we need something.
- Response – The response is when we perform a certain action that answers the craving.
- Reward – The reward is when we satisfy our craving.
No habit can be formed or performed if it doesn’t go through all four stages. At the same time, if the reward doesn’t answer our expectation, we might never act again.
However, if the reward answers our expectations and satisfies the cravings, there’s a big chance we turn a specific action into a habit.
For example…
Let’s get through a few examples.
Having a slice of pizza in the lunch break:
- Cue – We pass the pizza place. Our brain picks up the smell of cheese and all kinds of toppings.
- Craving – We start craving pizza and imagining all that cheese melting between our fingers.
- Response – We get pizza.
- Reward – We satisfy our craving of having hot pizza slice to enjoy.
If we genuinely enjoyed our slice of pizza, on the next day, we might pass by the same place and get pizza again. With the time, the process of deciding should we or should we not get pizza shortens, and we end up having pizza most of the time when we’re out for lunch. Having pizza in our lunch break becomes a habit for us.
Drinking coffee:
- Cue – We wake up and feel sleepy.
- Craving – We want to boost our energy levels and feel awake. We know coffee could help speed up the process.
- Response – We drink a cup of coffee.
- Reward – Almost immediately, we feel fresh and energized, ready for the day.
As a result, we start drinking coffee every morning after we wake up and with the time it becomes the most permanent habits we’ve ever performed – we never skip our morning cup of freshly done coffee.
Your life and habits
⇒All quotes in this post are from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. See Availability on Amazon or listen for free with Audible.⇐
Now, repeat the process from above for tens of times a day, hundreds of times a week and thousands of times a month.
What you get as a result is your life built on the base of tiny daily actions, repeatedly performed over and over.
Your life becomes a product of the daily habits you perform.
In that case, if you want to improve your life and be your best self truly, you might want to start choosing the right habits.
But how to make them stick?
It’s easy to have coffee every morning a slice of pizza every time you smell melted cheese. The rewards and the satisfaction of these two are almost poetic (depends on the mood).
But how do you implement less likeable habits like exercising five times a week, drinking more water, meditating, reading more and watching less TV or Netflix? How do you change your habit to procrastinate with the cleaning at home, to eat more healthily or to check your phone less throughout the day?
How to make habits stick long enough that they don’t feel like torture?
In this post, we will talk about seven techniques to make your habits stick around so you could actually change your life.
21/90 Rule of making habits stick
This rule is very simple.
You want to have a goal of doing something for 21 days until it becomes a habit. If you manage to make it for another 90 days, it essentially becomes part of your life.
The secret of the process is in dividing it into two parts.
First, you commit yourself to do something for 21 days only. It’s fairly easy for us to “give it a go” for a lesser amount of time than deciding to do it for the rest of our lives.
In these 21 days, you have enough time to adjust to the change and see the first rewards. Your brain picks up the cues and creates cravings for you.
Once the 21 days are gone, you commit yourself to perform the habit for another 90 days. Now it’s easier as you’ve already had the practice for 21 days and it truly becomes part of your daily routines.
By going through the other 90 days, you make that habit part of your lifestyle. It becomes easier to perform the habit than not to perform it.
Stack them together
⇒All quotes in this post are from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. See Availability on Amazon or listen for free with Audible.⇐
This is a very popular way to learn new habits – just stack together two or three habits and do them all at the same time.
You could attach a new habit to an old one, already developed that you don’t even realize you have.
Or you could attach a new habit to every other small daily action you practice.
Example of attaching a new habit to an everyday action: One of the hardest things for me to learn is drinking more than one glass of water per day. The easiest thing for me was to start the day with a glass of water and every time I visit thee bathroom afterwards I was drinking more water later. In this case, I was attaching the new habit to a daily action I cannot skip.
Example of stacking a few habits together: A great example of developing good daily habits is by stacking as many of them as possible into your morning routine. There are a few reasons for it. First, your will power is stronger in the morning than it is in the middle of the day or at the end of it. Therefore, it’s easier for you to include exercising, meditation, reading, and so on at the very beginning of the day.
The second reason is that you eat your frog for the day and you could move on with the rest of the tasks.
Therefore, my morning routine is performing a list of habits I want to implement permanently in my life, such as yoga, meditation and journaling.
The Two-Day Rule
I first heard about this way of making habits stick by Mat D’avella on Youtube. Then I dug a little bit further and saw that many of the successful people we see every day have used this way of developing habits and making them stick.
The Two-Day Rule is simple: when you’re creating a habit never allow yourself to have two days in a row of skipping that habit.
If you want to start waking up at 6 a.m. every morning, never wake up later than 6 a.m. for two days in a row. You could skip a day here and there, but not two days in a row.
Start Small
⇒All quotes in this post are from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. See Availability on Amazon or listen for free with Audible.⇐
Probably this is one of the most important ways to make habits stick.
Start small.
If you’re trying to implement a bunch of good habits that will truly improve your life and help you succeed, start small. Choose one habit and add another one later.
For example, if you want to get to the point when you’re running for 5 miles every day, start by doing a mile a day for a week or a month before increasing the number. This gives your brain time to adjust to the new behaviour, and it reduces the shock from the change in your life.
Every time you do something different and unusual, your body and brain go through a period of adjusting to that change. The bigger the change – the longer it takes you to accept it. By starting small, you make the transition easier and almost unnoticeable.
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Inside Of My Happiness | Journal for Living an Intentional Life
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Journaling has so many benefits, and you've always wanted to stick to it but never did. It looks and sounds complicated. You think that there are some rules you know nothing of and can't see the magic everyone talks of.
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Create Rules Instead of Habits
Before you create a habit, think of a rule that helps you reduce the thinking process.
Think of what type of person you’d like to be and what rules would that person have? For example, vegetarians don’t have to create the habit of not eating meat; they just follow the rule of not eating it.
If you’re trying to give up smoking, you might want to adopt the rule of never smoking. See it not as a decision you have to take every day, but rather a rule you simply follow.
For example, if you’re trying to lose weight and want to eat more healthily, have the rule that every time you have to dine out, you will have a salad. In this way, you will reduce the choices you have to make every time you’re out. You won’t have to go through the whole menu thinking of all the possibilities, but instead, focus on the salads straight away without further self-convincing.
A great way to implement this way to making habits stick is to use “I don’t” instead of “I can’t”.
Examples:
- I don’t drink alcohol instead of I can’t drink alcohol.
- I don’t skip yoga practices instead of I can’t skip yoga practices.
- I don’t eat sugar instead of I can’t eat sugar.
- I don’t bite my nails instead of I can’t bite my nails.
- I don’t stay overtime at work instead of I can’t stay overtime at work
…and so on.
Use Reminders
Have you noticed how many time you missed doing something just because you forgot about it?
The easiest example is about drinking more water. Most of the time, it’s not that we don’t want to drink water, but we simply forget to do it.
In this case, a great way to develop a habit and make it stick is by setting regular reminders to help us do it. Keep a yellow sticky note on your desk and every time your look at it, take a few sips of water.
If you want to exercise more, place your gym clothes next to your bed, so that’s your first thing to see in the morning.
Set your alarm to remind you when to perform a habit instead of expecting to remember it by yourself. You’re already busy enough.
You could also use apps to help you.
Make your habits stick by tracking them
Tracking your habits is a great way to have self-accountability.
You could create your own habit tracker in your planner or bullet journal or get one from Etsy. Here’s a simple list of the best Etsy habit trackers:
- Printable Habits Tracker with four different designs – Instant Download
- Simple All Year Habit Trackers – Instant Download
- Bullet Journal Habit Tracker – Instant Download
Place these habit trackers near the place you’re supposed to perform the habit.
For examples, if you’re taking cold showers every morning, leave your habit tracker in the bathroom. The same goes for flossing your teeth and so on.
Want to start waking up at 5 a.m. every morning? Leave the habit tracker next to your bed and once you’re up cross that day off the list.
The idea of this way to make habits stick is to reward yourself with the satisfaction of completing the habit immediately after performing it. It helps you feel that you’ve accomplished something (because you have).
All quotes in this post are from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. See Availability on Amazon or listen for free with Audible.
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7 Smart Ways To Make Habits Stick
Blogger, dreamer, procrastinator, and lover of everything soul-touching. My mission is to make you laugh, provoke your thoughts, light up your day and inspire you to fall in love with life and yourself.
Thank you! I reflect and write a lot about this topic of change and transformation of habits and conditioning, and I learned more by reading this article! 🙂
Thank you!