HOW TO SCIENTIFICALLY CREATE HABITS IN 5 EASY STEPS
I often get asked, “How can you fill your life with abundance and fulfillment? How can you create more confidence, and live the life you truly desire?”
The answer is to form empowering habits that ensure you live the life you seek.
Habits are Critical to Creating the Life You Desire.
Life is all about your habits:
1. Daily routines, or habits, make up most of your life. What you do every single day over and over again combines, over time, to become the very foundation of your life.
2. Habits are automatic behaviors. When you develop a habit, it takes that action out of the realm of having to make a conscious choice every time you do it. You don’t have to think about it or make yourself do something once it’s a habit. You just do it automatically.
3. Habits can be empowering or inhibiting. Positive habits help you get what you want while negative habits hold you back, preventing whatever you want from ever happening.
4. Positive habits create the life you desire. If you form positive habits, you’re more likely to enjoy the riches and fulfillment of the good life you want.
Your habits are the most basic elements of your life. Whether you look at your day-to-day routines or your overall life, it’s made up of all the behaviors you do. Those actions practiced consistently are your habits. So if you establish positive, empowering habits, you’ll live the life of your dreams.
The Science of Habit Development
New research by Phillippa Lally and others at University College London has truly shed light on the science behind habit development.
Here are the results of their research and some suggestions for creating new habits based on their findings:
1. A behavior must be repeated 66 times consecutively before it forms a habit. If you’ve ever tried to establish a habit by performing a behavior every day for 14 or 21 days, it probably didn’t work because you didn’t do the behavior enough times in a row in order to successfully develop the habit. Try it again, but this time for 66 days.
2. Repeat the behaviors in the same setting or situation. You’re more likely to form a habit when you keep doing a behavior in the same place and/or situation. Where you are affects habit formation.
➡ In essence, if you’re in the same place when you’re doing the new behavior over and over, you’re more likely to successfully form a habit. Form Empowering Habits To Create the Life You Desire 5
➡ Ideally, perform your behavior in the same room for the first 66 days. Whether you do the behavior in your home, office, or elsewhere, keep it in the same locale at first, and then you can expand to apply it in other places after you’ve established it as a habit.
3. Forming a new habit is “cue-dependent.” Whether you form a habit depends somewhat on cues in your environment and behaviors. There are 2 types of such cues, according to Lally and the other researchers: situational and contextual.
➡ Situational cues originate from your environment or location while contextual cues are other behaviors you do in conjunction with or related to the new behavior.
➡ An example of a situational cue is what you see in the morning when you first enter your kitchen: you see your coffeemaker and then make some coffee. Your coffee maker is, therefore, something that triggers you to make your morning coffee, which you do every morning (out of habit).
➡ An example of a contextual cue in this case of morning coffee is that as soon as you shut off the alarm and put on your robe, you Form Empowering Habits To Create the Life You Desire 6 head to the kitchen to prepare your coffee. Getting up and putting on your robe trigger you to go make your coffee.
4. Consistency is an important key to establishing habits. Results of the research also emphasize the importance of consistency when trying to form a habit – especially at the beginning stages of creating the habit.
➡ Although the researchers found you could skip a day when trying to establish a habit, it’s unknown how many total days you could skip during the 66 days and still successfully form a habit.
➡ During the studies, those who skipped days initially during the 66 day period were less likely to successfully establish a habit. One could theorize that you’re setting up your brain to become accustomed to a habit early on in the process.
➡ Make a pact with yourself to repeat the behavior for at least 66 days without fail. Start the new behavior at a time that you’re fairly sure you can repeat the desired behavior without interrupting your new routine.
5. Pair the new behavior with one you already do regularly. For example, if you want to start flossing your teeth, lay the package of floss right beside your toothpaste, or even on top of it, to be reminded to floss after you brush your teeth. Be consistent about flossing your teeth every single time you brush them.
Focusing on what you really want in life and developing habits that support those goals will ensure you live the life you seek.
Applying the information from this research will help you succeed in developing these new, positive habits, habits that will help you create the confidence, motivation, and unstoppable drive to live your best life!
You are Stronger Than Failure,
Danny Cole