You know what sucks? Trying to make and break habits and failing time after time.
The secret to living a nice life is to progress along a healthy, empowering trajectory.
You can’t do that with the habits and routines of the past.
I’ve been writing and teaching both as a life coach and friend about habit change for years. Routines are the programs we live our lives by. If they don’t empower you, they hinder you.
So if you’re sick of always failing and reverting back to your old ways, let me show you how I show people how to break habits, the practical way for beginners.
Identify Triggers
What triggers you? Is it seeing the gas station that sells your favorite sandwich?
Is it the sunset that tells your brain it’s time to start drinking?
Is it perceiving pain in the near future and so you try and save yourself by eating comfort foods, procrastinating or avoiding?
Triggers can be anything from a specific time of day to an emotional state or a particular environment.
Recognizing triggers means to pay attention. As soon as you get the desire to do the thing (bad habit) , notice your surroundings. What’s there? What sounds do you hear? What just happened? How are you feeling and why?
These are the patterns in your life that trigger the habit loop and cause you to behave automatically.
Remember, you’ve made the decision that these habits and routines need to get under control. The first step is to notice when they surface in your life, and why?
Pay attention to things that cause you stress during those times? Why does this habit make you feel better? Why did you make it a habit in the first place?
Bad habits can often be linked to trauma and stress, but it’s also possible that you simply had a way of doing things in the past and dont wanna do them that way any more.
Regardless, you want to know when the habit loop starts. It starts with a trigger, so what’s the “on button‘ that causes that automated behavior?
Replace the Routine
You have certain routines right now and they’re there because they work for you. Did you know that you could simply find another routine that is much healthier than the “bad‘ one you have and switch them?
Once you’ve noticed the trigger for the routine, and the habit that follows, determine what that habit provides you that you need.
We can use eating because it’s the easiest one to talk about, and one of the most common.
Let’s pretend that your spouse coming home with the mail reminds you of your financial situation, because you know there are bound to be bills in the pile they bring home.
As soon as you hear the car pull in the driveway you start to feel the negative emotions and all the stress, so you start to stress eat. You make yourself a big bowl of ice cream in preparation so you can drown the pain with sugar while you’re going over all the money you owe (and don’t have).
Clearly this isn’t good.
- You gain weight,
- all that sugar isn’t good for you…
- Even without the health issues, you’re weak in some manner. Drowning your pain with food is not a strong position for a human to be in.
Don’t you wanna be strong instead of a slave to pain and stress all the time?
If you wanted to change the routine to a more empowering one, everytime the trigger comes, you could go for a run.
Do something that makes you feel in control of your life, but is also healthy.
Maybe you find a really good financial podcast to listen to.
Maybe you have a favorite episode that really gets you excited to take control of your life.
Go for a walk with the headphones in, and then come back and take a look at your bills, having rewritten your routine and taken back control of your life! 🙂
Remember, none of this is easy. If you want control of your life, you have to do it anyway.
Make a new routine from scratch
It’s possible for you to create and program a new routine from scratch. This works especially when you’re interested in forming new habits rather than breaking old habits.
To do this, write down the behavior (routine) you want to establish. Then to the left of it right down what will occur as the cue, and then to the right right down the reward.
For example:
- Cue: Alarm going off
- Routine: Getting up and making yourself tea
- Reward: Watching the Sunrise with that tea, or sitting with your dogs in the morning.
Beat procrastination and lack of motivation with micro actions
Routine change works best when you perceive it as harmless. You don’t want your brain to think it’s gonna work. Micro actions work the best. Whatever you need to do, do it for five minutes.
The reason this works is because motivation almost never comes before the act itself, it comes during the act.
Your brain is already addicted to your current routines and habits, so breaking them is going against how your dopamine is wired.
This is one of the reasons why even simple behaviors become hard when breaking habits. Your brain is trying to stop you from going against the programming.
You can lessen this effect by doing things in small chunks.
For example: if you want to start an exercise program, you might feel lethargic thinking about doing it for an hour. So do it for ten minutes. Once you start and finish the ten minutes it will be much easier to continue for the full hour.
This is a huge secret to beating procrastination. When you don’t feel like doing something, do it for a short amount of time, or in a small way. You’ll feel better once you start and you’ll be able to continue most of the time.
Get through the shitty phase
There are so many different views on how long it takes to break habits. Some say 21 days, some say 67 to 250+ days.
My practical experience transforming my own routines (which I’ve had to do dozens of times) is that the first week sucks. It’s foreign. Your brain doesn’t like it, and it’s work.
Think about what routines are. They’re programs that your biology run on. Even if you’re exhausted, you can still get a warm shower and make coffee each morning because its a routine (cue, routine, reward).
You just have to get through the part of routine change where you’re rewiring yourself. For me, that lasted no more than two weeks.
Now, I’m not saying that habit formation only takes 14 days. I’m saying that 7 to 14 days is the amount of time it normally takes people to get the hang of it.
It stops sucking and becomes manageable.
This is for regular habit formation. If you have a serious addiction, clearly that process is going to take longer.
Stay Consistent
I’ve helped probably at least a hundred people so far break bad habits and form new routines, and a huge kink in peoples armor is staying consistent. The way I personally show them how to remain consistent is to be brutally honest with themselves.
If you don’t finish this you lose the game. You don’t get to live the life you want.
If you can accomplish this you resign yourself to be a powerless slave who has to obey the demands of your mind and brain. They tell you what to do. You’re not in control.
What kind of life is that?
Doing hard things makes you a human being worthy of respect. Maybe you’d argue that all humans should be respected by others, but if you were to show yourself who you truly are on paper, could you prove that to someone?
You can’t even put down the ice cream (or whatever you’re struggling with).
I’m not here to beat you down. Life has already done that enough.
I’m here to remind you about everything you lose if you give up.
Write it down. Make yourself a “what I will lose” list. I did, and it works. Look at it everyday until you’re sick of the idea of being weak.
Take the weight or overeating example again. Here’s your “what I lose list”:
- I’m tired of struggling to tie my shoes
- I sick of turning down beach and pool outings because I look and feel like crap
- I’m tired of stairs whooping my ass every day
- I’m tired of going out in public and being embarrassed by how much I eat
- I’m tired of being told to purchase two seats on airlines.
- I’m tired of being embarrassed about taking photos on holidays because I look gross.
- I’m tired of ending every year knowing that I could have finally done it had I just started twelve months ago…
Get sick of it and go. That’s my advice.
Secret Sauce: Keystone Habits Work!
I first learned about keystone in a book called How to Build Self Discipline by Martin Meadows.
Whenever I explain to people why keystone habits work I always tell them that they just make you more powerful. Keystone is the stone that keeps the archway intact. Remove it and the whole thing crumbles.
So when you have these foundational habits in your routine, you make everything so much easier for yourself.
A list of keystone habits:
- Exercise
- Healthy eating
- Deep breathing exercises
- Quality sleep
- Daily planning and journaling
- Gratitude practice
- Reading
- Continuous learning
Keystone habits can do several that will give you a leg up during the day:
- Improve your physical health by strengthening muscles, bones, and cardiovascular system
- Boost your mood by releasing endorphins, reducing feelings of stress, anxiety, and depression.
- Increase your energy levels
- They help with cognitive function and brain health, improving focus, memory, and mental quickness
- Keystone habits reduce stress and promotes relaxation
- Enhances self-awareness and emotional regulation, leading to greater emotional resilience
Those are all things that make your routine and habit change much easier to handle. So I highly recommend them.
Those are my practical tips for habit change: figure out what triggers you, replace the routine with another, fight procrastination with micro actions, push yourself viciously through the shitty phase, and for god’s sake never give up.
