HABITS
To Understand our habits, and how we can change them, we first need to understand exactly what they are, and how exactly they work.
This is important because studies have shown that between 60 and 90% of our daily behaviour is habitual, in other words we don't put any thought into what we're doing!
Watch this video to start:
THE CUE
Now that we understand what habits are a little more, we need to break down the actual process of why they occur.
This can be split into three stages:
1. The Habit Cue
2. The habit Action
3. The Habit Reward.
First things first, we need to identify the cue.
When we feel the urge to perform the habit, this is the cue.
When we feel the cue we need to answer one of the following:
- Whats the time?
- Where am I?
- Who's with me?
- What did I just do?
- What emotion am I feeling?
One of these is the cue, look for what stays the same!
THE REWARD
So far we've identified our habit, and been able to figure out what cue triggers us into performing the habit.
Now its the time to identify the reward that we think we're getting from the habit.
This is an important next step, which requires a bit of effort and experimentation.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
We should now have a good picture of what triggers our habit off through identifying the cue (if you don't go back and figure it out, its important) and we should have figured out what reward we think we're getting from the cue, and replaced it with something thats going to help us get to where we want to be.
What now?
We restructure the process with a simple, but effective way of doing things:
Important things to note when trying to change a habit:
It takes time. Be patient. It can take anywhere between 28 and 85 days to change a habit, with the mean average being 66 days, just over two months.
You will likely mess up and fall back into your old habit, thats natural. Its what our brain wants to do (the path of least resistance)
Stick with it, follow the process and you'll be heading towards progress in no time!