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How To Build Habits Successfully (Without All The Struggle)

Do you ever feel like developing habits is an impossible mission you’ll never be able to accomplish?

I know. Me too.

It’s too hard, you know. Waking up early when all I want is to keep sleeping.

Exercising when I would rather be in bed covered up to my head like Homer when he’s a big toasty cinnamon bun.

Going to work instead of being home with my dogs.

Everything seems so unattractive. Why would I want to be doing things I don’t want to be doing all the time?

Sometimes it seems like developing habits is just like being in prison. So depriving.

All I have to do is exactly the opposite of what I feel like…

Or is it?

It turns out it’s not. Once I learned a bit more about habits, I was able to get up to the alarm, exercise every day without feeling it like an effort, and do all sorts of stuff because I wanted to, instead of relying on motivation.

And I want to share my journey through the habits path because it really changed my life and I know it will certainly change yours.

What’s a Habit

According to researcher and social psychologist Wendy Wood, a habit is a learning mechanism, with an automatic nature.

It’s “sort of a mental shortcut to repeat what we did in the past that worked for us and got us some reward.”

You know when you go to the bathroom? What’s that thing you do right after you cross the door? You raise your hand and hit the light switch, without even thinking about it.

That’s a habit. You hit the button (action) and the light turns on (reward).

That’s also the reason why it’s so easy to acquire negative habits. Because they bring an instant reward (different from good habits, that bring a better but not always so instant reward).

A habit consists of three elements:

• Cue: What leads you to behave a certain way.
• Behavior: The specific action you perform.
• Reward: What you get as a direct consequence of the action.

So, want to change your habits? Change your behavior.

I know, it sounds easier than it is. But stay with me for a few minutes.

The Habit Formation Process

In the not-so-distant past, I had an extremely hard time waking up in the mornings. I used to set up the alarm for 7 am but ended up postponing it endlessly (or even turning it off).

When I finally got up, I felt frustrated, defeated. I felt like all the day ahead was already useless.

So I decided to locate my phone far from the bed (but close enough for me to hear it when it started to sound). When the alarm went off in the mornings (cue), I had no option but to get up (behavior).

I put the alarm far from the bed, so I had to get up if I wanted it to stop. And after a few seconds of literally wanting to die, I found that it wasn’t that hard.

I was awake and my day started flowing. I was more productive because I felt motivated and had literally more time to do things.

That was my reward, which also acted as a reason to do the same the following day.

This is an example of how changing the context helps you change your behaviors, your automatic responses to the things that happen around you. It’ll be hard at the beginning, but it will get easier when it becomes automatic.

Our brain takes the reward as an indicator that certain behavior is beneficial for us, so it tends to repeat it as a preset response to the cue.

Some Myths About Habits

The reason why it’s often so hard to change our habits is that we don’t actually understand how they work. So we try the wrong methods.

Sometimes we even do the opposite of what we should be doing.

There are some myths about habits that prevent us from being successful in transforming our daily lives into what we want them to be:

• It takes 21 days to build a habit: Actually, there’s no one size fits all time for incorporating a habit. According to Wendy Woods, habits “are created slowly as people repeat behaviors in a stable context.” And this can take longer or shorter depending on each person, and the context in which they’re inserted. So instead of focusing on a certain time, focus on preparing the context and trying what works for you.

• I need to feel like I want to do it: Don’t get me wrong. You need to be motivated. Motivation is a fundamental part of the habit-forming process. It’s crucial, and without it, you won’t succeed. Don’t mistake “feeling like” for “motivation”. You need to have deep motivation, but there are going to be days in which you don’t feel like keeping your habit-forming process at all. Habits need a trigger, a routine, and a ritual to stay alive. But before a certain action becomes a habit, you need to turn it into an automatic response, a natural behavior. Remember, habits don’t rely on willpower, they happen automatically. Which takes us to the next myth.

• I need to build more willpower: This is one of the most harmful myths because it turns the habit-forming process into a real nightmare. Fighting with yourself all the time is tiring, isn’t it? Habits don’t rely on willpower. They’re automatic processes that happen when you’re not thinking, not the other way around. As habits are triggered by a cue, an effective way to change them is by working on the cue that triggers your behavior, instead of developing willpower (much, much harder, and exhausting).

• My life needs to be calm and organized to start developing habits: Sometimes we dream of that day when the perfect moment to start arrives. And our entire lives pass in the meantime. There will never be a perfect time to start developing a habit. It’s just a matter of deciding which habit you want to build and making a plan to successfully do it. In fact, it works in the opposite way: You need to develop habits for your life to stay organized. So when unforeseen events arise, you’ll be prepared and will avoid complete chaos.

Also Read: How to Become an Entrepreneur (And Quit Your Job) in 3 steps – A Starter’s Guide

“When you choose your habits you’re choosing who you want to be”.

Santiago Salom. Argentinian Entrepreneur (the translation is mine)

The truth is that incorporating a habit is not just about doing things differently but about being who you want to be.

How to Form a Habit

Around 45% of the things we do every day are not conscious decisions. They’re habits. That means we don’t have to think much about it because it’s incorporated into our automatic mode.

So, if you could transform those actions you want to incorporate into your everyday lives, into things you do automatically, it would be much easier than having to convince yourself to do it every time.

But how can you do that?

Here are a set of actions recommended by the most expert referents in the habits & productivity field. I personally used them to change my life and incorporate all those habits I’d been wanting to have for a long time.

1. Find Your Most Precious Inner Why

Habits take you from where you are circumstantially to where you want to be intentionally.

So when you’re trying to build a habit, the main thing you need to keep in mind is your why. Why do you want to do this?

Instead of trying to find the willpower to do something, find a reason. That’s much stronger and can lead you to take action much more effectively.

Don’t try to imitate what other people do. Don’t just train because others are training or because it seems the way things have to be done.

Train because it aligns with your main values and wishes to be healthy and to practice some sport you love. Train because you want to enjoy some time for yourself. Do it for real reasons.

That’s how when you’re tired and find a million excuses for not exercising, you’ll have a more valuable reason to actually do it.

Also Read: The Secret Sauce to Building your Business While You Work 9 to 5 (and having more free time)

2. Develop Rituals

What’s a ritual? Basically, a ritual is a set of habits that are chained together. By chaining habits, you make sure that everything happens.

A few weeks ago, I was having trouble incorporating exercise into my week.

It was just extremely hard to take the time to do it after work because I was tired. I always found an excuse not to do it. I didn’t know what to do until I had an idea.

I had a morning ritual that was going well.

That’s how I’d achieved to wake up early, have a good breakfast, read, pray and walk while listening to an educational podcast.

The success of these morning activities was based on the fact that it was a ritual. So I decided to include a short exercise daily routine (instead of two long sessions a week) in my morning ritual.

Problem solved.

I not only achieved to exercise but also to do a much better quality set of exercises that positively improved the way I felt.

Try including a habit in a ritual that makes sense for you. Soon, you’ll be performing all those activities without even noticing.

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3. Improve Your Context

Do you ever feel like you want to do something but the people around you or circumstances out of your control prevent you from doing it?

It happens a lot. Maybe you want to have dinner early so you can sleep more but your family eats late.

Maybe you want to exercise but you have trouble finding your clothes in the morning and don’t want to be loud so you end up failing at it.

But although there are things that you can’t control, there’s always something you actually can do to overcome the hurdles.

Talk to the people who live with you. Don’t expose yourself to things you know won’t help. Organize the elements of the environment in a way that helps you.

If you want to develop a reading habit, leave books around. Have a nice place to sit (so you avoid the bed). Set a time for reading and leave distractions far from that place. Try to read where there’s not a TV or other distracting elements around.

If you want to build an exercising habit leave your sports clothes handy. Especially the footwear. Once you achieve to put on your shoes it’s extremely hard to go back.

4. Track Your Habits

Last year I started exercising after work.

Everything went well, until one month I couldn’t keep the habit. I felt frustrated, so I looked at my habit tracker and I realized that I was also skipping meals and sleeping less than 7 hours.

I discovered the reason why I wasn’t exercising: When the workday ended, I was too tired to do it. I just didn’t have the energy.

How can you certainly know if something’s working? Or even if something’s happening the way you want it to happen? By tracking and measuring results.
If you track your habits, it will serve as a motivation for you to continue, especially in the hardest times, when you don’t actually feel like doing it.

It will also serve as useful information that will help you find out if your routines are the right ones for you. Keeping track of your habits will increase your ability to build new ones and keep the others in place.

Also Read: Want to Incorporate New Habits? These 4 Golden Rules Will Help You

5. Avoid Frustration: One Habit at a Time

Did you ever reach the end of the year feeling frustrated because you didn’t achieve a single one of all those goals you’d set in January?

It happened to most people at least once. In fact, according to Forbes, only 8% of people achieve their new year’s resolutions.

We tend to set a huge amount of goals at the beginning of the year because we feel fresh and motivated, but that motivation is ephemeral. You need to have a plan and choose only a set of goals per year.

Trying to accomplish everything you want in life in just one year will only lead to frustration.

Also Read: How to Create a Vision Board: a Beginners’ Guide.

6. Optimize the Process: Use the Compound Effect

This is probably the most important aspect of developing a habit. This is the key that’ll help you multiply results with less effort and in less time.

What does this mean?

The compound effect is an expression that comes from the compound interest concept applied to the investing field.

When you invest a certain capital, you get a percentage of interest over the initial capital. But if next time you apply the interest, not only over the initial capital but also over the previous interests, you’ll get a bigger profit.

Applied to habits, this means that building a certain habit can multiply the results if you develop them in a certain order.

That way, if you try to build the habit of waking up to the alarm before developing a habit of sleeping a good amount of hours, it’ll take you much more effort and probably also much more time to create that habit.

Instead, build a good night ritual that leads you to sleep better first, and then probably it won’t be so hard to wake up as soon as the alarm goes off.

Using the compound effect to develop habits multiplies results and helps you leverage them to create new ones. And that takes you from where you are circumstantially to where you want to be intentionally, sooner, and better.

Check out my Resources Section! Improve your life and upgrade your skills now:

Resources

Let’s Do It

Building a habit is not about self-control or willpower.

It’s about building routines that help you behave in a way that takes you closer to your goals.

You can develop healthy habits today, with the life you have. With all those obligations. You just need to follow the right steps and stop trying formulas that don’t work.

It’s scientifically proven that habits are formed by a cue, a behavior, and a reward. Not by an enormous, inhumane effort, self-deprivation, and a constant fight against yourself and what you feel like doing.

So stop waiting for the perfect moment and start now. Start simple.

No more frustration and defeat. No more constantly fighting with yourself.

Cue. Behavior. Reward. Keep this formula in mind, follow the steps in this article, and finally start creating the habits you’ve been trying to build for so long.