Deciding to pick up new, healthy habits to change your life for the better is just the first step –it’s following through on these habits on the first few days that’s the real challenge, and in a lot of cases, many people often give up after a few days once they find that they can’t stick with their new habits.
However, forming habits doesn’t have to be too complicated. Here’s how you can get started on your healthy, productive habits and make them into a routine:
1. Start by picking out a few habits that you want to cultivate over the next few weeks
Small things can be huge later on, and something small as sleeping in before 12 a.m. or reading a book at least once a day can be a good start.
Be sure to pick habits that can interact with each other easily. This is because habits that reinforce each other are more likely to stick, and they do this because they have a more obvious effect on your daily routine.
For instance, being on time, sleeping early, and waking up early are all interlinked. In order to get to work on time, you need to be able to wake up early, and to wake up early, you need to sleep in early.
2. Find out why other habits didn’t stick when you tried the last time
It’s not enough to struggle to wake up early in the morning – you also need to figure out why you have such a hard time waking up in the morning.
To find out the root cause of your problems, ask yourself why the effects happen in the first place, and by tracing where the answers come from, you can find yourself at the root of your problem that you can fix much more easily.
3. Start planning your habits down to the time you start doing them
When it comes to setting a new habit for yourself, schedules and planners are your best friends as they let you know if you are on or off-track in your planning process. Not only do they allow you to see the tasks that you need to complete for a certain time period, but they also allow you prioritize which tasks need to be done first.
Once you start getting the hang of the daily schedule, you can even kick it up to start planning your week, your month, and even your whole year.
However, as much as you want to plan, you also need to be realistic in your planning process. You are also just a person, and you need to breathe once in a while.
