18 Tricks to Make New Habits Stick
Wouldn’t it be nice to have everything run on autopilot? Chores, exercise, eating healthy and getting your work done just happening automatically. Unless they manage to invent robot servants, all your work isn’t going to disappear overnight. But if you program behaviors as new habits you can take out the struggle.
With a small amount of initial discipline, you can create a new habit that requires little effort to maintain. Here are some tips for creating new habits and making them stick:
1. Commit to Thirty Days – Three to four weeks is all the time you need to make a habit automatic. If you can make it through the initial conditioning phase, it becomes much easier to sustain. A month is a good block of time to commit to a change since it easily fits in your calendar.
2. Make it Daily – Consistency is critical if you want to make a habit stick. If you want to start exercising, go to the gym every day for your first thirty days. Going a couple times a week will make it harder to form the habit. Activities you do once every few days are trickier to lock in as habits.
3. Start Simple – Don’t try to completely change your life in one day. It is easy to get over-motivated and take on too much. If you wanted to study two hours a day, first make the habit to go for thirty minutes and build on that.
4. Remind Yourself – Around two weeks into your commitment it can be easy to forget. Place reminders to execute your habit each day or you might miss a few days. If you miss time it defeats the purpose of setting a habit to begin with.
5. Stay Consistent – The more consistent your habit the easier it will be to stick. If you want to start exercising, try going at the same time, to the same place for your thirty days. When cues like time of day, place and circumstances are the same in each case it is easier to stick.
6. Get a Buddy – Find someone who will go along with you and keep you motivated if you feel like quitting.
7. Form a Trigger – A trigger is a ritual you use right before executing your habit. If you wanted to wake up earlier, this could mean waking up in exactly the same way each morning. If you wanted to quit smoking you could practice snapping your fingers each time you felt the urge to pick up a cigarette.
8. Replace Lost Needs - If you are giving up something in your habit, make sure you are adequately replacing any needs you’ve lost. If watching television gave you a way to relax, you could take up meditation or reading as a way to replace that same need.
9. Be Imperfect – Don’t expect all your attempts to change habits to be successful immediately. It took me four independent tries before I started exercising regularly. Now I love it. Try your best, but expect a few bumps along the way.
10. Use “But” – A prominent habit changing therapist once told me this great technique for changing bad thought patterns. When you start to think negative thoughts, use the word “but” to interrupt it. “I’m no good at this, but, if I work at it I might get better later.”
11. Remove Temptation - Restructure your environment so it won’t tempt you in the first thirty days. Remove junk food from your house, cancel your cable subscription, throw out the cigarettes so you won’t need to struggle with willpower later.
12. Associate With Role Models - Spend more time with people who model the habits you want to mirror. A recent study found that having an obese friend indicated you were more likely to become fat. You become what you spend time around.
13. Run it as an Experiment - Withhold judgment until after a month has past and use it as an experiment in behavior. Experiments can’t fail, they just have different results so it will give you a different perspective on changing your habit.
14. Swish - A technique from NLP. Visualize yourself performing the bad habit. Next visualize yourself pushing aside the bad habit and performing an alternative. Finally, end that sequence with an image of yourself in a highly positive state. See yourself picking up the cigarette, see yourself putting it down and snapping your fingers, finally visualize yourself running and breathing free. Do it a few times until you automatically go through the pattern before executing the old habit.
15. Write it Down – A piece of paper with a resolution on it isn’t that important. Writing that resolution is. Writing makes your ideas more clear and focuses you on your end result.
16. Know the Benefits - Familiarize yourself with the benefits of making a change. Get books that show the benefits of regular exercise. Notice any changes in energy levels after you take on a new diet. Imagine getting better grades after improving your study habits.
17. Know the Pain – You should also be aware of the consequences. Exposing yourself to realistic information about the downsides of not making a change will give you added motivation.
18. Do it For Yourself - Don’t worry about all the things you “should” have as habits. Instead tool your habits towards your goals and the things that motivate you. Weak guilt and empty resolutions aren’t enough.
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Comments
Wake Up! says on August 14th, 2007 at 3:45 pm
Next list I need to find is “18 tricks on how to select the habits you need”. There are so many habits I want to acquire, from speed reading to excersizing and from goal settting to saving… I simply can’t find the time for them all! Help!!!
//Sleeping Dude
cmanlong says on August 14th, 2007 at 11:02 pm
great article. I have read about your site but honestly had never visited until today. I was stumbling around and came across this article. I enjoyed this so much I have made it one of my Profitable Productive Posts being published tomorrow.
Edward W. Smith says on August 15th, 2007 at 8:43 am
Nice article, well written and very helpful. One of the other helpful things about changing a habit, is that we feel better about ourselves. Here is one of my recent One Minute Motivators that makes this point:
“Feeling good is earned, it doesn’t just happen. General George Patton said “ Accept the challenges, so that you may feel the exhilaration of victory “. General Patton was telling us something that we can use in our daily lives, not just military battles. If you want to feel good, you must “earn” that feeling by doing something to feel good about. The way you will “earn” that feeling is by accepting challenges, be they ever so small, and overcoming them. Then you will have a feeling of achievement.”
OK, thanks and keep up the good work, Edward W. Smith http://www.brightmoment.com
les says on August 15th, 2007 at 10:04 am
You should research your topics a little more deeply, “go to the gym every day for your first thirty days”? That’s horrible advice, someone with even the most rudimentary physical fitness knowledge will tell you that doing this will lead to injury. Be a more responsible writer, man.
Gary says on August 15th, 2007 at 10:06 am
Some good tips here, thanks!
Mark says on August 15th, 2007 at 10:19 am
In response to les, maybe hes not going to the gym for resistance training maybe he just goes and runs for 30min each day. There is no harm in doing that every day.
As far as weight lifting. Don’t do it every day if you are a beginner.
FireXtol says on August 15th, 2007 at 10:41 am
I found what really helps me with my smoking urges is deep breathing exercises to oxygenate your body, and gives you a little rush similar to smoking. Or think about how my [future] children will have to watch me suffer on oxygen… til I finally die from smoking-related illness, like my father did.
Also, make a list, and read it and affirm everything on it every morning and night, before you goto sleep and after you awake, during the day, whenever you need it.
I also wrote on my cig pack NEVER AGAIN F*** IT! and x’ed out the Camel logos and basically just had fun defacing it.
FireXtol says on August 15th, 2007 at 10:44 am
You’re right about habits though, I’ll get up from my PC to go outside and smoke, and then have to stop myself!
Instead, while I’m up, I do some sit-ups, push-ups, etc.
Replacing BAD habits with good ones is the BEST way to form new habits and keep them, atleast I’ve found that to be true.
read_man says on August 15th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
@ Les
If your goal is making trips to the gym a habit, you want to physically place yourself in the gym every day for 30 days. When you go to the gym, you are not required to exercise strenuously. Do light workouts for 30 days but do make sure you get to the gym. Light workouts won’t advance your level of fitness as hard workouts (with appropriate amount of down time) but the point here isn’t getting fit. It’s making a habit of the process that will result in fitness.
In other words, Les, think before you flap your jaws. Maybe you should spend less time developing your biceps and more time developing your problem solving skills.
TLT says on August 16th, 2007 at 1:32 am
“A recent study found that having an obese friend indicated you were more likely to become fat.”
Careful with that. The study’s findings were infinitely more complex than that. It followed people over the course of several decades (making the chance that anyone would gain weight much greater) and the study wasn’t even devised to examine this particular thing – so the findings are somewhat suspect anyway.
The prevalence of obesity among groups of friends was something that was observed secondarily. No causation was implied. The only certainty was that friends influence each other’s perception of what is acceptable or normal. That’s hardly a groundbreaking conclusion to reach.
Kristen's Raw says on August 20th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
I loved this article. Thanks!
Kristen
http://www.KristensRaw.com
Lisa says on August 25th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
My word! Let’s be sure not to have any obese friends! It would be nice not to alienate people struggling with obesity any more than they already are. Perhaps an obese person would get skinnier if they hang out with thin people! Did that enter the researcher’s study?
Linda Wallace says on November 30th, 2007 at 4:47 pm
I think your ideas are quite helpful. I’ve been trying to establish the habit of taking along reusable bags when I do my marketing. I wrote about the trials of being green on my blog, http://linda-wallace.blogspot.com, and quoted one of your suggestions.
Phillip J. Eby says on January 3rd, 2008 at 11:44 pm
A minor nit: the technique described here as a swish isn’t even remotely like an NLP swish, and following the instructions given here will not produce the same effect as a swish. Brains are like computers: garbage in produces garbage out.
Here’s a page that has a more accurate description of the technique:
http://www.manifestation.com/neurotoys/swish.php3
But the best descriptions, in my opinion are in the books “Using Your Brain For A Change” (by Bandler) and “Change Your Mind And Keep The Change” (by the Andreases).
(Also, the swish is generally used to remove bad habits or provide new choices in response to old stimuli; it’s not as useful a tool for installing new habits. A different method described in “Using Your Brain For A Change” has worked better for me, and it’s what I teach in my own workshops.)
sharon says on August 4th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
Habits, hard to break as we want the Mc donalds society of wanting it now but we need to realize our fries took longer
Derek @ NüHabits Personal Change Network says on April 1st, 2009 at 5:01 pm
I also suggest getting a network of people committed to the same habits as you wish to embody.With this in mind, I recently started a new social network called NüHabits, where people can find other people who are working on the same habits – squashing bad ones or forming good ones. It’s free, and it can be one more tool in your arsenal against complacency!
healthy god says on April 27th, 2009 at 7:53 am
My word! Let’s be sure not to have any obese friends! It would be nice not to alienate people struggling with obesity any more than they already are. Perhaps an obese person would get skinnier if they hang out with thin people! Did that enter the researcher’s study?
ChironBoom says on April 30th, 2009 at 10:35 pm
Excellent article!
I too am in the process of acquiring many new habits, I have the bad habit though of take on too much at a single juncture…
Looks like back to the drawing board in listing the priority of habits! :)
Just one negative thing to say about your article…
Exercise every day? I feel this should be changed, because most beginner bodybuilders might take the same attitude towards that, and every day… thats just overtraining, which you do not want!
I know there is common sense, but alot of people throw it away and take everything quit literally which they read online!
Also no pain, no gain, is a common phase!
Cheers.
SJ says on September 26th, 2009 at 4:32 am
Free web app that emails you daily asking you a yes or no question about whether you followed through on a habit you want to establish (exercising daily, drinking 8 glasses of water, cutting caffeine intake). If you say “yes” for 21 days in a row, you’ve done it. Skip a day, and start over at day 1. Invite a friend to keep you accountable…. cool stuff!
Harry Che says on January 8th, 2010 at 1:20 pm
great tricks.
Also recommend a goal tracker http://www.GoalsOnTrack.com, it has a nice habit tracker too.