How to build a Habit? A practical approach!
If you search on google — “How to build a habit?“, you will be presented with a jungle of misinformation that constantly grow lush. If you have watched TV shows, you might have heard of — “Doing something for 21 consecutive days will make it a habit”, which has no scientific proof or support. However, in recent years, studies in neuroscience have shed some light on the fundamentals of behavior change. Building a habit takes strategic planning and well defined actions. The book “Atomic Habits“ by James Clear lay out the detailed explanation of how you can turn simple and small tasks to your advantage and change your behavior. In this article, I will present a simple framework which is inspired by similar ideas presented in James’s book and also look at how I used those ideas in personal life.
To change a behavior, first you need a commitment and be clear on what you want to achieve. It doesn’t have to be a very big goal, and if you can make it tied to someone other then yourself that would have the biggest effect. For example, If I start exercising every day, it would inspire my kids to be more health conscious as well. So consider what it will mean for others — not just for you.
Second, you need to identify triggers in your daily life. Triggers are simple task that you do everyday without thinking about them. For example, waking up in the morning could be the first trigger for doing something else in the morning. Make triggers as specific as possible. For eg. after brushing your teeth what you do next? Identify small tasks in your daily life which you could use as triggers. A made-up rule called “2-minutes rule” would help keeping the trigger task very small and atomic. The 2-minutes rule states that you should be able to complete the identified task in two minutes or less.
Third, you need to plan ahead. For example, if you are looking to going for a run in the morning, put the water bottles, running shoes and other gears out so there is no friction in the morning trying to find different things. Planning ahead will make sure there’s no justification for when your mind decides to give up on the task at hand.
In conclusion, identifying small tasks and chaining them together with other tasks makes it very easy to accomplish bigger goals. Be clear on what you would like to achieve and divide it in smaller chunks and work on small chunks one at a time.
Personally, I have made it a habit to exercise in the morning as follows; wake up → make my bed → brush my teeth → do 10 pushups → 5 min mediation → go for a run → workout. In here brushing my teeth is a trigger for the meditation practice and meditation is a trigger for the run and finally workout. To achieve this, I had to be consistent, one day I would only get until meditation, others I get to run. However, initial triggers such as making my bed, brushing my teeth, and meditating were very important and by doing them consistently everyday pushed me to workout everyday.
