Transforming habits
The best way to make yourself grow is by improving the things you do each day
Most of us have notions on habits and their importance for our lives. They can make you improve or slowly deteriorate. Habits determine what we end up doing each day. They compound themselves into a constant decay of health and failures or achieving goals and incredible performances.
There is a great range of books on the matter of habits and how the mind works in this relationship. Two of the main ones are James Clear’s Atomic Habits and The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.
J. Clear’s book gives a practical guide through habits and how to change them. Duhigg writes with more examples on how habits impact daily life and the workplace as well as showing the cue-response-reward system. If you are going to read just one, I’d go with Atomic Habits, because of the way it’s written and how it focuses on the core activities needed for change. There are other books on this topic as you can find for yourself with a quick search on amazon for the word “habit” and you’ll get over 20,000 results.
The way to start taking up habits. Mirror needed.
Habits are crucial. I have become convinced as time has passed by. There are a lot of great habits you can take up on. Be it reading, writing, exercising, meditating or even having a 10 minute conversation with your couple, one tends to see all these changes as too big to make all at once.
Seeing them as a big package of changes one must make converts it into a monster too large to start tackling. We have a clear objective of what we want to achieve, but the process becomes a blur. We want to read 50 pages a day, meditate for 30 minutes, exercise for an hour and want to have meaningful conversations for a whole hour. We check our calendar, see the 24 hours, see that we want to sleep 6/8 and we start giving up. I’m not saying you don’t need the finish line but it may be harming your way into your habits.
So, what’s the real question you need to ask yourself? You’ll need something to change habits and that object is TIME.
You’ll first have to make time to get to know yourself. Ask yourself who you are, what do you really want to change, where do you want to make that change and for whom? Is it for your family, your friends or even just yourself? Don’t think of that last one as selfish. Working on yourself will ultimately benefit everyone surrounding you, so get acquainted and give yourself time to think of all these questions. Write the answer somewhere.
Here is when a daily short routine can come in handy. To know yourself you need to sit in silence, go to the top of the mountain1 and take a certain distance to see your own life more clearly. You need to stay out of the noise to differentiate the signal. Give some meaning to your life. The easy task is to just sit there, try to write some answers to questions relevant to your being.
After that, you move and try to see where there’s room for growth. Can you read a book on the subject? What can you see that helps you to gather more accountability on your own actions?
Recommendations on changing habits to grow propose starting out with small tasks. Stopping before you grow tired of the new activity. Going for a run, but just 10 minutes. Reading only one page. You want to end on a cliffhanger, wanting more. You want to play with your anxiety and trick it to want more of that positive activity.
What to do first? Goal setting is important, but identity setting is importanter
Sometimes, it’s easier to analyze what habits we don’t want in our life, and that helps to know where to cut things. Drinking, smoking, videogames before bed, Netflix binges and fast food are common negative habits people want to move aside to make time for better activities. The thing is one of the strongest ways one can achieve this is by changing your identity.
As James Clear says in Atomic Habits, if you think of yourself as someone who is a reader, you’ll probably end up taking advantage of time windows to read a couple pages. If you declare yourself a writer, you’ll make time for writing. Creating an identity is crucial to trick your mind into doing these activities. In the end, that’s what you are probably aiming for right? The goal is to become these traits, so they’ll be easier to take up.
Changing habits
One of the best strategies I’ve heard on changing habits is to replace activities and consciously decide to change our response to some relevant cues i.e. replacing fast food with healthy alternatives that are already prepared or easy to cook. When having the urge to light up a cigarette (cue) you decide to drink a cup of water or create another alternative that becomes the response to the cue.
You want to have a better life, that better life is made by each day, what is your ideal day like?2 Plan accordingly and see how it’s moving you to the identity you want to be.
I’ll take an example of a habit change that may be common, but with purpose it can totally change for the good.
Imagine you want to read more, you currently read like 6-12 books a year and have a real hard time deciding what to read.
I would recommend asking yourself these questions first:
What do you want to read on?
Do you want to make reading a hobby to read literature?
Are you searching books focused on your job growth? Personal development?
The real question behind all of these is the next one:
Why do you want to read?
After answering this, you plan accordingly.
When will you read and how will you make sure you won’t be interrupted?
Write down a list of books you are interested in.3
Some people have an easier time setting their alarm clock earlier to make space for their personal time (I do this each day), others are more comfortable with doing it before bed.
Then, you create a cue, what will make it evident that you need to read. Is it putting your book on your side of the bed, is it setting an alarm? You want to have a hopefully visible sign that makes you know you must read. After that, you’ll have to reward yourself. I drink a cup of coffee after reading. Rinse and repeat until it becomes natural to take the habit up.
Ending thoughts
Changing habits is elemental to living a better life, if you have a very unorganized day to day, it’s hard you’ll show order and a good job without a gigantic show of effort. It’s a priority to make doing good things for yourself and others the easiest way possible, so you can use up that effort on new tasks that may be harder. I’ve only skimmed on the subject and I highly recommend reading James Clear’s book for great advice and steps on changing specific habits.
Marcus Aurelius
James Clear asks this same question when speaking on Ryan Holiday’s podcast last week.
If having trouble with this, take a book you’ve enjoyed and choose a book based on it’s bibliography on a topic you are interested.
Felicitaciones, Francisco!! Un gran aporte!! Creo que James Clear debería saber de esta página...
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