5 Reasons Why It’s Important to Develop Good Habits
Part of living a happy and healthy life is transforming your knowledge or inspiration into a daily habit. While forming good habits is a great way to improve your experience, have you ever wondered why it is so essential to develop good habits and eliminate bad ones? Here are five reasons why it is necessary to form good habits.
Habits Are Who You Are
A habit is something that you do daily without really thinking about it. The habits you form, like brushing your teeth or maintaining a healthy life, your habits become a considerable part of your routine that they ultimately become who you are.
You Can Change Your Habits
The best thing about habits is that if you don’t like them or they aren’t working for you. Your old habits can be incredibly challenging to break, and the worst the habits are, the harder they are to stop. If you want to begin eating healthier, all you need to do is start skipping your morning scone until it becomes second nature to pass up the sugary pastries at breakfast.
Good Habits Allow You to Reach Your Goals
If you have been dreaming about becoming a marathon runner, you won’t jump into the first marathon offered by your city without training. It can take months, and even years of meticulous preparation to become fit enough to compete in a marathon successfully. The first step to reaching any goal is first establishing a daily habit. If you want to find a new job, you have to get into the habit of looking for work every day.
Habits Set a Foundation for Life
Since your habits become you, the habits, whether good or bad, that you choose to follow ultimately will set the tone for your entire life. If you have a habit of greeting your family with joy, you’ll end up becoming a joyful person. If you have developed the habit of eating vegetables with each meal, you will end up becoming a healthy person. Set yourself up to live a happy and healthy life by choosing to develop good habits.
Habits Can Replace Motivation
Everyone has days where they just don’t feel like exercising, working, or eating well. However, when you can develop these activities into habits, they will become second nature, and you’ll do them without having to think.
Developing a foundation for healthy habits will greatly benefit you for the rest of your life. Developing good habits isn’t an impossible task, and with the right determination and practice, you can make the process easier.
The Three Phases of Habit Formation
The habits of highly successful people allow them to perform behaviors consistently that breed success. Most people believe that they can form a habit in 21 days if they consistently perform a desired behavior consistently for approximately three weeks. However, this simply a realistic view on how habits are formed. The formation of habits actually take place through three distinct phases, the honeymoon phase, the fight thru phase, and the second nature phase.
The Honeymoon Phase
The honeymoon phase of habit formation is often characterized by the feeling that it’s easy. As most married people will tell you, at some point even the greatest honeymoon must come to an end. The honeymoon phase of habit formation is usually a result of being inspired by something. For example, you might attend a highly motivational personal development conference, and for the first several days afterward you are determined to make positive changes in your life.
The Fight Thru Phase
Once the honeymoon phases end, your inspiration will fade, and reality will set in. This is the phase where you might find yourself struggling with completing the positive habit and your old habits are just waiting around the corner for their chance to move back in. The key to successfully getting through this phase is to win two or three “fight thru’s.” To win a fight thru you should use the following techniques.
· Recognize that you are in the fight thru phase.
· Ask questions and bring your emotions into the equation.
· Imagine how your life will be in five years if you don’t make the necessary changes.
The Second Nature Phase
When you enter the phase of second nature, you start to feel as though you are getting into the groove of things. Once you find yourself in this phase, you’ll need to keep an eye out for the following common interruptions.
· Discouragement
· Disruptions
· Seduction of success
If you end up experiencing one of these interruptions it has the possibility of sending you back to phase two. By winning two or three of the fight thrus, you will find yourself back in the second nature phase where you can continue to move forward in forming more positive habits.
Most people think that forming positive habits is a simple as completing a new task consistently for 21 days. Unfortunately, it takes a bit more time than that. Good habits require commitment and hard work. Keep these three phases in mind the next time you want to form a good habit to help you reach a higher level of success.
Top Tricks and Tips for Making New Habits Stick
Having everything in your life running on autopilot would be a nice change of pace. Not having to remember to do your chores, exercise, getting to work, and remembering to maintain a healthy diet is something just about everyone could get behind. However, unless you can manage to invent robot servants, your daily work isn’t going to simply disappear. However, if you program behaviors, you can eliminate much of the struggle. With a small amount of discipline, you can create new habits that require little maintenance. Here are some of the top tips and tricks for making new habits stick.
Start Simple
You don’t want to try and completely change your life overnight. It can be easy to get over-motivated and try to take on too much. If you wish to change your habits and ensure that they stick, then you need to start off small and build on your momentum.
Commit to 30 Days
It takes just between three and four weeks to make a new habit automatic. If you can get through the initial conditioning phase, which lasts around 21 days, you will find it much easier to sustain your new habit. A month is a good chunk of time to commit to change since it fits in your calendar easily.
Make it Daily
If you want to make a new habit stick, it is critical that you are consistent with your actions. If you’re going to start exercising, you have to go to the gym every day for the first month. Only making it to the gym a couple of times a week will make it much harder to form the habit.
Remind Yourself
After committing yourself to your new habit for two weeks, it can be hard to remember what you’re working toward. Place reminders to work on your habit each day around your house, or you might end up missing a few days. When you miss time, it defeats the purpose of setting the habit in the first place, so make sure you are constantly reminding yourself of what you are trying to achieve.
Remove Temptation
In the first 30 days, you need to restructure your environment so that you don’t have any temptations. If you are trying to eat better, remove all the junk food from your house if you’re trying to quit smoking, throw out your cigarettes so you won’t have to struggle with your willpower later.
Getting your new habits to stick can be quite a challenge. Follow these tips and tricks for getting your habits to stick so you can change your life for the better.
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