From The Positivity Blog:
Read the whole article.Do You Make These 7 Common Mistakes When Changing a Habit?
“First we make our habits, then our habits make us.”
Image by Wolfgang Staudt (license).
Charles C. Noble“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
AristotleChanging a habit is not always easy. It becomes even harder to change when you make what I believe are some common mistakes. I have at least made them quite a few times.
So I hope you’ll find something helpful in this article. Something that will make it at least a bit easier to change your habits and change your life.
1. Trying to change too many habits at once.
This is perhaps the most common mistake. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the enthusiasm and the hope that you will give your life a total overhaul. Nothing wrong with that.
But in my experience you won’t be able to keep it up until your new habits are established and stable. Sure, you can live on your enthusiasm for a week or two. But sooner or later life interferes or the stress of doing it all at once causes too much inner and outer resistance and you give up.
Changing a habit is a lot of mental effort. You have resistance from within as your mind tries to drag you back to the comfort it has known for so long (no matter if that familiar place isn’t that healthy for you). You may face resistance from the outside as people question your change.
Changing just one habit at a time may seem pretty boring. But do you want the excitement of the thought that you are completely changing your life but then have little to no results later on? Or do you want a real change in your life?
If you want the real change then you may have to take the more boring and patient route.
My advice would be to go for the one habit you want the most right now and just focus on that one. And to let go of listening to the voice of the inner child that tells you “I want it all right now!”.
2. You are not doing it long enough.
When I tried to add a habit of working out each week I think I failed about four times before it really stuck.
A common piece of knowledge is that you should do something for 21 days and it will stick as a new habit. For me it has taken longer than that. It has been messier.
It does seem to matter how much effort it takes to incorporate the new habit. And how much discomfort it causes you. Some habits I have slipped into quite easily within just a few weeks.
But allowing for at least 60 days or up to 90 days to work on your new habit – with a few periods of slumps or failure during that period – before it sticks doesn’t seem unrealistic to me.
3. Not finding the right way for you.
When I wanted to lose weight and increase my energy I knew I needed to do more cardio. I tried running. I tried the elliptical bicycle in the gym. None of them was much fun at all. I really didn’t like them.
I didn’t really get the cardio habit to stick until I started using the bodyweight circuits from the Turbulence Training program in the beginning of 2009. I liked them because they were quick and intensive and I could them anywhere as long as there was a floor. That combination really helped me to stick the program.
So experiment. Find the solution that fits you.
This comes from The Art of Manliness:
Forging Habits of Steel: 7 Tips on Making and Breaking Habits
by on December 7, 2009
Habits make the man. Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do.” If you want to be productive, you need the habit of planning. If you want to be physically fit, you need the habit of exercise. When you take a look at the habits in your life, what are they saying about you?If you want to feel less restless and become more productive, it’s imperative that you break from your bad habits and develop good ones. When you have to decide every single day whether you’re going to go the gym, plan out your day, or read a good book, when you leave those choices up to your whims, to that day’s circumstances and your current mood, you’ll usually end up punting. It’s psychologically taxing to make the same decisions every day, and the more you fail to live up to your goals and break a contract with yourself, the less confident you become, and the less success you have with each new endeavor. As you begin to see yourself as a failure, it becomes a terrible self-fulfilling prophecy.
Men who feel like life is hard often have failed to form good habits. Every day is a struggle between what they want to do and what they end up doing instead. They can never find that groove, where the habits that make you stronger, healthier, and happier become almost automatic, giving you that feeling so central to a satisfied life: that of making continual progress.
If you’re not happy with where you’re at with your habits, below I’ve provided a few timeless tips that great men have employed to become the men they wished to be.
How to Develop a Habit
1. One thing at a time. Many men I know never change because they always try to improve everything about themselves at the same time. I do this too-you start feeling unhappy about your life and so you make a list of all the things you need to change, believing that starting the next day you’re going to totally transform yourself! It makes you feel really pumped. But changing one habit is hard enough; changing five at the same time is usually impossible. You’re juggling a bunch of balls and eventually you get tired and they all fall to the floor. And there you are, back at square one.
Dave Ramsey has a snowball debt plan in which he recommends paying off your smallest debt first. The idea behind the plan is twofold, that one, once the first debt is paid, you can take the money you were paying towards it and start using it to pay off the next debt, and two, that the satisfaction you’ll get from knocking out the first little one will keep you motivated to wipe out the rest. Cultivating new habits works in the same way. Start with the habit that will be easiest to gain; the confidence you garner from mastering it will carry over to your next hardest habit. Your confidence will keep snowballing; when you reach that hardest habit, you’ll finally have enough mojo built up to attain it.
It can be hard to place something you really need to tackle on the back burner, but you have to realize that doing so is the only way to ensure that you’ll finally be able to pursue it with success. Patience, young Padawan.
2. Launch your habit with as strong an initiative as possible. Just as a rocket needs a huge burst of energy to escape earth’s gravitational pull, man needs to exert a massive amount of energy in the beginning to break or create a habit. When developing a new habit or breaking an old one, we need to do something that shakes up our current mentality and makes us receptive to change. So go full-tilt in the beginning. Kiss your soul-sucking friends goodbye, pack up the car and move, sign a year contract with a gym, throw away all the cigarettes (or in my case, the Diet Mountain Dew) in your house; whatever. Just make a big deal out of it.
3. Make a 60-day goal. That “21 days to develop a habit” theory you may have heard is probably bunk. The theory was created by a plastic surgeon turned self-proclaimed psychologist who wrote a book called Pyscho-Cybernetics. (The book is the 1960s version of the The Secret.) There’s no hard scientific evidence to back the claim.
In fact, a recent study done by actual scientists suggests that it takes on average 66 days to form a habit. The number of days depends on the type of habit you’re trying to form. Easy things like drinking a glass of water in the morning took less time compared to hard things like daily exercise.
So give yourself 60 days to form your new habit. 2 months is a long time to stick with something, but you’re a man-you’re up for the challenge!
Read the rest of the article.
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