Habits

How to use habits

Think of habits as behaviors that are repeated consistently in two ways, constructively (healthy habits such as sleeping well, eating well, exercise, reading, meditating, working efficiently, socializing, and so on) - that elevate your lifestyle, and destructively (smoking, eating junk food, not exercising, constantly stressing, and so on) that lower it down, and make your day to day living worse, and with it your chances of accomplishing goals are reduces, as most require continuous action to be complete.

Which raises the question, how do we then approach our habits?

First, pinpoint your one keystone habit, what habit if done, makes others much easy? For me it's waking up early, for some it's diet, for some, it's exercise, or running, or meditating. But the point is to find your anchoring behavior and then stack other positive habits on top of that one.

Your approach should be gradual at establishing both the keystone habit, and any other that you want to have in your life, or rather become. As you are what you do on a continuous basis.

If you haven't exercised, don't start with 5 days a week, start with 2, do it for a month and then raise it to 3, and reach 5 eventually, and see if that's the tempo you want, if not, pull back, adapt and maintain.

On top of this, you can take account of your current + and - habits.

Do a mental check, we are usually quite aware of them. Think of new year resolutions, and what do you normally promise yourself you'd start or stop.

Final thought, think of habits as an evolving set of daily/weekly behaviors that bring you closer to becoming the best version of yourself, achieving your goals, and fundamentally your vision and mission.

As you change, and as your goals change, and the bigger picture becomes clearer, so will your habits change to support them.