Good Habits

Good habits are hard to form yet easily broken.
Bad habits are easy to form and much harder to break.

I don’t subscribe to this idea of X weeks to form a habit because human beings are far too complex. We’re all individuals, and we all find we have different motivations and habits of mind. The problems with such absolutism are that when we don’t form a habit in the prescribed time frame, we consider ourselves failures. Just like a baby takes its own good time to learn to talk or walk, we will form habits differently from one another. I haven’t quite figured out my time frame or whether I have a time frame at all. But, I’ve been on a mission to find out how I can create a habit. A habit does not magically appear after X days. It needs to be worked on. 

I have a theory! I think this idea of a set time frame for forming habits was a creation of the Bootcamp and gym ‘lobby’. I’ve tried bootcamps; they broke me but more on that another time. By creating a time frame for forming a habit, they coerce you to commit. If it were that simple, more of us would have kept exercising after our Bootcamp horrors concluded – oh, the horrors!

All a habit really is, is forming a routine. Routines are often tied to something; it’s what helps us develop what we call habits – good or bad ones. We form habits/routines because they come to benefit us somehow. Even our ‘bad’ habits come to benefit us even if ultimately they hurt us. Our habit of having a scotch after dinner is enjoyable (a benefit) but ultimately not good for our health. It is those connections to benefits that help the formation of habits. We can also better form good habits if we find a hook for what we want to form a habit around. So, if you’re struggling to get out of bed in the morning without browsing your phone for half an hour first, you can create a hook that ties getting out of bed with your morning browse. It’s a quid pro quo – but you need to commit.

Commitment is a doing word.

To form a habit, we need to figure out what works for us as individuals. For myself, I accidentally discovered the power of the hook earlier this year when I created a hook and threw it out too soon. I did that whole New Year’s resolution thing. It’s what happens when you grow tired of feeling the way you do. So I decided to try something new. I got myself a diary (they never work for me) and decided to hold myself to account. 

I listed off 3 areas to focus on:

• creativity
• activity
• consumption habits

… and as part of that, I created what I now know was a hook. 

• Take a photo each day and post it to instagram.

About 3 weeks in, I got sick of the photo component. My photos were dull, and I decided I didn’t need to do that part anymore, having declared that I had formed my habit. Predictably I stopped doing the other parts too. Was it a lousy hook? Maybe? But I’d underestimated how vital that hook had been to me. So I went from eating better, exercising more and actually improving on my health metrics to nada in just a few days.

Like most things in life, habits aren’t black or white.

We label them good or bad, but with so many good habits there are ways it doesn’t work for us and with ‘bad’ habits, there are many ways that it does serve us.  

We need to look at our goals and aspirations and see our habits as helpful towards those ends or harmful. Reframing our habits/routines like this can have us understand why it can be so challenging to get started, keep going and develop lifelong wellbeing. 

This thing I am doing right now will get me closer to that thing I want. It’s a simple thing when you say it out loud. Connect the two.

What have I learnt about my own goals? That I’ve focussed too much on how I don’t enjoy doing the thing that will get me closer to my goal, rather than setting my focus on my goal and what it will be like when I get there.

Look at that beautiful thing in the future, enjoy the small improvements along the way. Use what you can that works for you to form those habits… but don’t reward yourself with a chocolate bar.