How to form habits?

You must have tried to form new habits. Sometimes you do have started to build a new habit like reading, exercising, eating healthy or whatever. But you might have failed to stick with it. So here problem is not about how to form habits rather problem is how to stick with a particular habit. Now the question arises.

How can we stick to a habit?

You know we all human beings are wired to avoid hard things. At physical level it is easy to do hard things. But at a mental level it is 10 times harder to do something as compared to physical level. And I believe that this is the reason why most of the people work physically for their whole life. Forming a habit is more about mental pain which we want to avoid. Every action requires energy. If something requires more energy, less likely it is to occur.

If your goal is to take three healthy meals a day, that’s a lot of energy. You may start with motivation and do it for few days. But then after few days you will come back to your normal and unhealthy meals.Instead of this you can make a goal of eating one fruit or one bowl of healthy snacks a day. Now this will require less energy and more likely to occur.

How you can use your environment to build a habit ?

After waking up in the morning first thing you can do is making your bed. Later on if you watch TV put your remote back to TV’s stand after watching it and arrange the pillows on the couch. When we do these things it gives us a sense of motivation the purpose of resetting everything is not simply to clean up, but to prepare for the next action.

• If you want to go for exercise, just wear your workout clothes and take your water bottle.
• If you want to read more, then put your book on the top of table in front of your eyes.

In this way changing your environment according to your need will help you to build a habit. Now you can reverse this thing if you want to break a habit. For example if you watch TV, Netflix or YouTube a lot and want to get rid of it, then you can unplug TV after every use and logout your accounts after watching Netflix and YouTube. And it would require more energy to plug again or sign in again that’s why it is going to occur less and less over the period of time.

How to get motivated in a habit when rewards are delayed?

When you know that a particular habit will give you results after a long period of time. For example- in exercise you will not get much results in two months you know that you have to working on your body for 2 to 3 years for transformation. What most people do here is, they go hard on themselves to build that habit. The quicker you get harder to build a habit, the quicker you will lose. Because you cannot form any habit by going against your mind. So be true to yourself and understand your mind.

When you set a long term goal to lose weight, to learn five new skills, or to learn a new language. What happens is your brain won’t take any interest. Why? Because your brain want instant gratification. It will not going to take any interest in what will happen after two or three years.

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