There’s so much advice about how to develop good habits on the internet and it’s made out to be so easy. So why do you still find it so hard to develop good habits of your own? The truth is, developing good habits that actually have a meaningful impact on your life is hard, really hard. It’s not as easy as taking advice like; “Just be positive!”. Whilst it helps to be positive, most people can’t just flick a switch in their heads to start feeling positive.
In the real world, people are creatures of habits and routines which is why it’s so hard for you to create different habits. The first thing you’d need to do is to change your current ‘bad’ habits to make room for your new ‘good’ habits and that takes a lot of conscious effort when you’ve been living a certain way for years upon years. For example, if you’ve been eating a packet of chips and a chocolate bar with your lunch since you were in junior school, it’s going to be rough getting out of that routine. Even with a potential small change like this, it’s a habit itself that needs to be broken and I don’t know about you but I certainly find change difficult.
Over the years I’ve developed my own bad habits like playing too many video games in my free time, eating too much junk food and not exercising enough. When you reach the age of thirty you have to take things like your diet and your exercise routine more seriously and things suddenly seem more like an uphill struggle.
However, when you’ve taken your childhood bad habits into adulthood how do you suddenly change them?
Over the last 18 months I’ve managed to finally develop some good habits that have not only increased my productivity but also had a positive impact on my mental wellbeing. I finally got an exercise bike for some much needed cardio, go back into a regular drawing habit and consistently written articles on this blog and others.
You have to care enough
When the pandemic hit the world and I had to stay at home, I finally had a break from the hustle and bustle of everyday life and it gave me a chance to think much clearer. The excess of free time forced me to evaluate where I was and what I actually wanted in my life. I realised that I’d been blaming work for having no time to exercise and for eating rubbish food. My desk job meant that I’d put on weight and I wasn’t happy at all with how lazy I’d become. Life was moving past me and I no longer had the good habits I’d had when I was a teenager.
Of course, life does get in the way as you age and it becomes more difficult to develop and keep good habits if you don’t care enough. Most of us are so caught up in our busy lives that the small habits that actually make us happy and healthy get pushed aside. That’s why it’s so difficult to keep good habits that actually make a difference to your life once you’ve formed them. According to this survey, most people quit a diet within three months and many of them quit within the first 7 days.
So why is this? A lot of the reasons for people quitting diets seems to be the same for sticking to any form of new habit; it’s uncomfortable or you can’t be bothered anymore. The truth is, sticking to something like a new way of eating is exhausting when you’ve been eating whatever you like for years. You suddenly have to think and plan which takes a huge amount of effort and tolerance.
People talk about willpower when they’re trying to develop good habits or quit bad habits but it really comes down to whether you give enough of a shit. If you think about all the things you do keep up in your life like your relationships or your job you probably do so because you give a shit. There’s only so many things we can cram into our lives and those things have to be the things we truly give a shit about otherwise we’ll eventually give them up.
I personally decided that I gave enough of a shit to start exercising on a regular basis but I started small and put 20 minutes here and there into my week.
Carve out a bit of time to begin with
Even though there’s usually so much to think about, there’s still time to form and feed a good habit. I stuck 20 minutes of exercise a few days into my week before upping it to 30 minutes 3-4 times a week. The rubbish thing about developing good habits is that you often don’t see the positive effects of them for a while. This makes it easy to give them up quickly and tell yourself, “I might as well not do them at all then.”
There seems to be a steep curve when developing a good habit and it’s getting over that uphill bump that is the most difficult thing for most people. I don’t think you’ll ever get to a place where you can coast downhill (unless you reach the mastery level) but it becomes much easier on the other side of that bump. A lot of people quit there diet before they see any real results or they stop writing before their work gets published. Because it takes time for a good habit to pay off, it’s also important to carve out that time each week otherwise it will never have a chance to develop. It’ll never stand a chance.
Make that free time your b*tch
I’ve tried to develop lots of habits and most of them have failed because I haven’t given them a living chance to survive. I’ve slid back into bad habits or spent too much time procrastinating. Sometimes you have weeks that are just so hectic you need to get things done but other weeks you suddenly have lots of free time on your hands. It’s those occasions that make the biggest difference.
The odd occasions where I find myself with bundles of free time is where I struggle the most. It’s easy to choose to relax and watch the hours go by so this is the time I have to tell myself to just get on with it. For example, instead of watching YouTube for 3 hours I dedicate my time to writing or developing some artwork I’m working on. There’s times when you just don’t feel like doing something and that’s okay but it’s also a dangerous trap that I’ve fallen into many times before. If I work on habits that I’m trying to develop I end up increasing my motivation for the next time I work on my habits even though I felt like kicking back and relaxing beforehand.
The next time I have a chance to do some more it’s easier to pick up from where I was. A feeling of time well spent is better than the feeling of mindlessly relaxing. That sensation of productivity is the fuel for developing good habits.
Tolerate before you master
Building healthy or good habits sucks. It’s painful at first and reading hundreds of (ironically) listicles on the subject isn’t going to help unless you tolerate the change immediate yourself. Ignore the rubbish online that tells you; ‘building a new habit only takes twenty-one days!’. That claim is outdated and and we all know people have different tolerance levels. Common sense tells us that to build a new habit you’re going to have to tolerate the discomfort of it at first before it becomes something normal to you.
In fact, in my own journey to building new habits recently I learned that there are three key stages to the process;
Tolerate>normalise>master.
For example, if you’re trying to get fit then you’re going to need to carve out time to go to the gym several times a week. At first it’s going to suck because you’re not used to it. You’ll probably feel out of place and nervous, as if you don’t belong there. After a week or two it suddenly becomes normal to head to the gym after work. Once you’ve been going for several months you’re at a point where you don’t even think about how uncomfortable it is, you just go. After a longer period of attending the gym you can begin to master your new habit and take your fitness to mastery levels because you’ve been laying the ground work for so long.
Whilst you’re in the ‘tolerate stage’ there will times where you want to slack off and this is when you need to tell yourself to shut up and just do it. For me, it didn’t come back to willpower, instead it was the notion that if I didn’t develop these new habits then when would I? There’s always a tendency to say tomorrow. It’s the procrastination monkey inside of all of us that tells you that you could be doing something more relaxing or easy instead.
I am yet to master these new habits but I’m well on my way. Whatever habit you’re trying to develop, you need to trust the process. This is especially important in the ‘tolerate stage’. It’s so true (unfortunately) that worthwhile things take time. However, you’ll be fuelled by the thought that you’re already so far along then when you first started (or if you hadn’t started) and your efforts keep compounding as you move along.