CREATING NEW HEALTHY HABITS

If you have not already done this I would urge you to read this book written by James Clear - Atomic Habits.

This book talks about habit formation and the key teaching I took away from it was that it is much easier to create a new habit than it is to curb a bad habit.

So in todays blog I will teach you how to create new habits that stick around so you can start shaping your ideal lifestyle.

Create A New Habit?

The best way to create a new habit is to make your environment simple to achieve it. Basically what I mean by this is to shape your environment in a way that makes doing the habit you want to keep easy to do everyday/week/month.

For example, if you are struggling to fall a sleep or are having problems with sleep the best way for you to enhance your sleep would be to create a better sleep environment. You can do this by reserving your room strictly for sleep. Go ahead and ensure that you keep your phone, TV and work away and keep your bedroom for one sole purpose... sleep. That means whenever you enter your bedroom or lay on your bed your mental headspace will be ready for sleep.

If you make it simple your brain will shut off a lot easier and you will be able to sleep better. If you complete other tasks in your bed this will result in you thinking about those tasks as you are falling a sleep or during your sleep. Resulting in a worse sleep state...

If your goal is to increase your walking activity then you can get a smartwatch that tracks your steps, check your phones health app for the amount of steps you are doing to log your activity and always set up your runners, shorts and a t-shirt near your door. By doing this you have the clothes and shoes ready at the location you would leave from, you are checking in on your activity level and your mind will recognise this as a thing that you do now.

Now if your goal is to eat healthier, whole foods maybe making a change to your shopping habits could be the key here. Revamping your pantry and fridge to ensure the foods that are more accessible are your whole foods will mean you are more attracted to that than the chocolate bars that you need a ladder to get to. By making it harder to reach the fruits that are on your kitchen bench may be more enticing for you.

How To Get Rid Of Bad Habits?

In the opposite way you can actually remove bad habits also and I will provide you with 2 ways to achieve this goal.

1. Make it more difficult to complete - if you have a habit of smoking, hiding your cigarrettes or leaving them in a hard to reach place every time you smoke will make it annoying but also harder to achieve. If it is on your person you can easily pull out a smoke whenever you want however if you make an effort to put it in a place that becomes annoying or hard to reach you will be less inclined to smoke.

   

2. Replace the bad habit with another habit - using smoking as an example again... most people may smoke at the same scheduled times everyday or evening. Making sure you save these times and replace the habit with another habit could help you discontinue the old. You smoke the first thing you wake up with a coffee, instead change the first thing you do in the morning with another task like going for a walk, eating breakfast or having your coffee in a different location. By doing this your brain will recognise that you want to do something different now.

In summary to delete a habit you do not want to do becomes a bit of a harder process to making a new one. So my advice to you would be to keep adding new healthier habits to your lifestyle and setting them up in a way that it becomes easy to achieve. Follow on from this by making it hard to achieve your bad habits or the habits you want to get rid of. You will find that over time you will be replacing bad habits with good ones :)

Closing Thoughts

As shown above I want you to add new habits that are going to benefit your life and remove old habits by creating an environment that makes it difficult to achieve them.

By doing this you will be creating the lifestyle that you want to live. You will finally start becoming the person you dream of becoming.

Habit stack towards a better you!