How To Develop Strong Habits with 7 Easy Steps - Better Being

How To Develop Strong Habits with 7 Easy Steps - Better Being

95% of everything y'all do is a result of your habits which could be helpful or hurtful. This is the seven-step formula for developing a strong habit! The question is what is the time period to form a new habit into your daily routine? 

The period can be any length from a single second to several years, the speed of new habit pattern development is largely determined by the intensity of the emotion that brings the decision to start acting in a fitting way. For example, putting your hand on a hot stove or touching a live electrical wire will give you intense and immediate pain, the experience may only take a split second but for the rest of your life, you will have to develop the habit of not putting your hand on hot stoves or touching live electrical wires. The habit will have been formed immediately and remain lastingly. 

Psychologists refer to this as a significant emotional experience sometimes they call it "SEE" a significant emotional event. Any experience of intense joy or pain combined with behavior can create a habitual behavioral pattern that may endure for the rest of a person's life, 

According to the experts, it requires about 21 days to eradicate or establish a habit pattern of medium complexity, by this we mean simplistic habits such as getting up earlier at a definite hour, exercising each morning, listening to podcasts in your car, going to bed at a certain hour, being punctual for appointments, these are habits of medium complexity that can be quite easily developed in 14 to 21 days through practice and repetition over the years. A simple strong proven methodology has been defined for unique habit development. You can practice it to develop any habit that you fancy over time, you will find it more comfortable and more natural to develop the habits that you want to unite into your personality.

Clearly Decide On a Specific New Habit

You must make a decision, decide clearly that you are going to begin acting in a specific way whenever that behavior is required. For example, if you decide to develop a habit of rising early and exercise each morning, set your clock for a specific time, and when the alarm goes off quickly get up put on your exercise clothes and start your exercise session. 

When you decide to develop a new habit and are determined about it, your brain signals and reacts to that particular stimulus which will trigger you to act in a certain way. Decide the stimulus that you face daily and specify what those stimuli will trigger you to do.

Also Read: Procrastination Types & How To Overcome It With Ease 

Never Allow Exception

Never let an exception to your new habit pattern while the developmental stages. Don't make excuses or rationalizations, don't let yourself off the hook. If you resolve to get up at 6 a.m.each mornings, discipline yourself to get up at 6 a.m. every single morning until this becomes automatic. If you start taking an exception on a new habit during its formative stage, you get casual about it. Your brain starts to take it as not so mandatory habit and doesn't really care about it. 

Even if you follow it for a week after taking a day off from it, your brain will still take it lightly since you broke the habit in its initial stage itself. Let the habit develop till a stage where it becomes your routine then you might wanna take an off cause at that point the habit becomes your routine so it's not gonna be so easy to break. Focus on your developing habit and be invested in it completely.

Let Others Know About Your Goal

Tell others that you're going to begin practicing a particular behavior. It's amazing how much more disciplined and determine you will become when you know that others are watching you see if you have the will power to follow through on your resolution. This is something that is innate in every human, our performance gets better or we are likely to behave better when we know we are being monitored and then we put the best of us in that particular activity. 

Same goes with the exercise of developing a new habit, when we are being monitored we are likely to accomplish our resolution because our brain thinks that if we don't complete the task that others are aware you're pursuing, it will put you down in front of them. Though, it hardly matters what other people think of us, but works quite well with respect to developing a new strong habit.

Also Read: How to be more confident? Build your confidence 

Visualize Yourself Behaving a Particular Way

To develop in your new habit visualizing yourself performing or behaving in a particular way in a particular situation is very effective in developing a new strong habit. The more often you visualize and imagine yourself acting as if you already have a new habit, the more rapidly this new habit will be accepted by your subconscious mind and eventually become automatic. 

Everyone knows how visualization works well and how effective it is. So, Apply it in your habit development routine as well. Your subconscious would more likely to accept a habit pretty fast when you not only act but visualize yourself forming that particular strong habit. Every morning make it a routine to visualize those habits and that you are very comfortable with performing habits.

Create Affirmations

Create an affirmation that you repeat over and over to yourself,  this repetition dramatically increases the speed at which you develop a new habit. For instance, you can say be like "I get up and get moving instantly at 6:00 a.m. each daylight",  keep repeating these words over and over until you sleep. In most cases, you will automatically wake up minutes before the alarm clock goes off at 6:00 a.m., and eventually, you will require no alarm clock at all. 

Affirmations just confirm the fact in our mind that we are serious about it and sends signals to our brain that we are gonna do it very seriously. While developing a new habit, affirmations are one the easiest way to trick your brain into doing something. Ask people who are close to you to keep reminding you about those new habits that you have decided on, tell them your affirmations and your plan, it's gonna force you to achieve those strong habits.

Persist Until It Becomes Automatic

Persist in the new behavior until it is so programmed and easy that you feel uncomfortable when you do not do what you have determined to do. Keep doing something over and over until it becomes a routine, for example, eating food, bathing daily, these are some habits that if we don't do then we feel something is missing or lacking. 

That's how much you want to be determined to develop a new habit that you feel uncomfortable when you don't do that. Adopt that habit as it's the only thing that's keeping you alive. Associate that habit with some emotion so that you remember it every time that emotion comes into you. Habits are things that work automatically, we don't need to work hard on them when those habits are formed. So, during the development stage of that habit, be determined, and keep persisting until it works on auto-mode.

Also Read: 9 Natural ways to boost Self-Esteem & Confidence 

Reward Yourself

Give yourself a reward of some kind for practicing the new behavior and habit. Each time you reward yourself, you reaffirm it, reinforce the behavior. Soon you will start associating that habit or behavior in your unconscious that each time you di it, it rewards you. You set up your own force-field of positive consequences that you unconsciously look forward to as a result of engaging in the behavior or a habit that you have decided upon. 

Most of us have heard about Pavlov's classical conditioning, it works the same way but on a different tangent. When we get used to rewarding ourselves for a particular behavior, our unconscious forces us to do that over and over again, which results in the formation of new habits. The brain wants to feel good and that reward will make it feel good and our brain will program itself to think that some particular habit fetches us that reward, so it will reinforce you to engage in that particular behavior all the time.

Remember 95% of what you achieve in life or don't achieve is because of your habits either good or bad, the rule is to form good habits and make them your masters. Develop new strong a good habits, turn it into your routine, these good habits will definitely help you in the long term. Habits are formed for the longer term, so don't be short-sighted and look for immediate gratification. I hope all of you start working on developing new strong habits immediately that will serve you for a lifetime. Lots of love!