You've always wanted to develop good habits like:
- go to bed early
- read a book a week
- 10,000 steps a day
- Where to plan in advance
- plan early, review late
- Do not complain
- Don't say "impossible"
You know, with these habits, you are more likely to have a wonderful and fulfilling life, but after trying, you find that good habits are hard to develop. Even if your goal is only to stick to 100 days, it is often abandoned halfway due to some accidents.
So, you start to think: Are there any methods and experiences to help you develop better habits?
In fact, as long as you can do the following 5 points, habit development will be much easier:
- Find your inner drive
- Reduce the difficulty of change
- Make changes visible
- award
- allow exceptions
1) Find your inner drive
There are many scenarios that will make you feel the urge to change. For example, if you go swimming and find that your friend has six-pack abs and you have three tires on your stomach, you may say, I must exercise, I will apply for a card when I go back, and go to the gym every day.
But the result is often that when you are swimming, you make up your mind, leave the swimming pool, and answer your home, and feel that this matter is not that important. , and it's over in the end.
The reason for this is because the idea of "forming a fitness habit" is stimulated by the external environment, not your inner desire. The motivation for you to change is external stimulation, and the external stimulation disappears. After that, you lose motivation and will not implement the change.
In the same way, many middle school students insist on studying and practicing every day, and they can be called academic masters. However, when they arrive at university, they lose the habit of studying every day, live in a daze, and their grades plummet. It is also because studying every day in middle school is not his own desire, but He was forced by his parents, so when he went to college, without the external motivation of his parents' forcing, and if he didn't find the inner motivation, he would naturally give up studying.
In order for a habit to truly be implemented in you, the habit must be driven by your heartfelt desire. Only when you start from yourself and sincerely want it can you develop this habit.
For example, the habit of "planning early and reviewing late" can make you make progress every day, and you can make great strides. If you feel good, you should have this habit. But if you don't associate it with some kind of sincere desire or desire of yours, then you close this article and let go of this habit.
But if you really want to be proactive, productive, and a trusted professional within a year, you'll ponder:
- Is this habit right for me?
- Planning in the morning and reviewing in the evening, what will I become by living and working with goals every day?
- How do I get started?
- How do I continue, what if I don't want to be so disciplined one day a week?
When you think about it like this, this habit will connect with you, and it will really become your habit because you want to become a professional, helping you achieve your goals.
This is where you found the inner drive to form the habit.
2) Reduce the difficulty of change
Many times we fail to develop a habit, because the difficulty we set for ourselves at the beginning is too high.
For example, if you think that morning people are very successful and outstanding, you decide to develop the good habit of "getting up at 5 o'clock every day, reading for an hour, and running for an hour". But the result is sure to frustrate you: it's too hard, it's impossible to stick with it, I can't, I can't do it.
But in fact, if you analyze it, you will find that what you call getting up early is three habits: getting up early, reading, and running. You want to develop three habits all at once, it is too difficult, stressful, and often give up.
Habits are best cultivated one by one, and after one is formed, the other begins.
For example, you can start with a habit of getting up early: get up at 5 every day. I don’t agree on what to do after getting up, whether it’s reading a book, making breakfast, or watching an American TV series, all of which will work. Let yourself get up first.
When you can get up at 5 o'clock for 21 days in a row (there is a saying that you can form a habit in 21 days), you can think about whether to read an hour of books or run for an hour.
At this time, because getting up early is no longer a problem, and there is no pressure, all you face is the pressure of persevering in reading. It is much easier to deal with just one kind of pressure than to deal with all three at the same time.
Some people think that getting up at 5 o'clock is still too difficult, then Ok, this change can also reduce the difficulty. For example, if you wake up at 7:30 in the morning, you can first wake up 20 minutes earlier than your current wake up time, persist for a week, and then 20 minutes earlier, each time for a week earlier, until the wake up time becomes 5 o'clock.
Other habits are similar. Take the habit of "planning early and reviewing late" as an example. If you can't plan early and review late every day at the beginning, you can do it on a weekly basis, plan the week's events every Monday, and review and summarize every Friday. This will reduce the difficulty a lot.
After you get used to the weekly plan and review, then adjust the frequency, such as every two days, every day.
3) Make changes visible
Even if you find inner motivation, it is still very difficult to stick to one thing for a long time. You'll feel bored, you'll wonder if what you're doing is really helping your future goals, and you'll even give up because you can't see results for a long time.
One practical way to get out of this situation and improve your success rate is to make the change visible.
For example, in order to have a good figure, a girl decides to develop the habit of "don't eat after noon", then you must put an electronic scale at home and weigh it every day, so as to see the effect of weight loss; you can also buy a few 25 (1 foot 9 inches) jeans, the tightness of the waist can make you feel the change in your figure immediately, triggering your motivation to not eat after noon.
Another example is the habit of "planning early and reviewing later". If you want to make changes visible, you can:
- Use a paper notebook to record the results of daily planning and review (paper records are more rewarding and easier to see changes than electronic ones)
- Use a paper notebook to record what you accomplish every day (this is the success diary mentioned in "Puppy Money")
- Put the two notebooks in a visible place on the workbench
In this way, you can see these two notebooks every day when you go to work, and you can see your records every time you open the notebook. When you see that you have done so many days, when you see what you have accomplished every day, You will think: oh, so I've done so much, so I've done a lot of things.
This feeling will motivate you to keep going. Because we all crave positive motivation, a feeling of joy, you instinctively chase that feeling, and it also leads to your future goals!
4) Rewards
If you have played games, you must have a deep impression of leveling, passing levels, and playing bosses. Every time you kill a little monster and rise a level, there will be rewards in terms of gold coins, equipment, titles, etc., so that you can see, wow, I got XXX, I have reached level 68!
That's the joy, excitement, and excitement that rewards bring! You'll crave that kind of stimulation again, and then you'll keep playing, and playing...until the anti-addiction system prompts you.
When building a habit, we can draw on the reward mechanism in the game.
When you complete a task, when you persist for a week, you can give yourself a reward, such as a smiley sticker (you can save 10 to exchange for a prize), such as playing a round of Werewolf, such as watching an episode of Chu Qiao Biography, such as Buy yourself an antique bookmark, like a mechanical keyboard for yourself.
In this way, your persistence will be more fun, more interesting, and more worth looking forward to.
5) Allow exceptions
I set up a group to get up early to check in, and my friends check in in the group every day. If you are late or miss a punch, you will be given a red envelope of 50 yuan. Do not leave the group.
When each friend joined, I told him the rules, and after he read the rules and agreed, I added him to the group.
But there are still many friends who choose to withdraw from the group and give up persistence after being late.
Most of the friends who quit the group like this actually don't care about the habit of getting up early and don't really want it.
There are also some friends who do not allow themselves to be an exception. They feel that if they are late once, their beautiful image will be ruined, and they will lose face, so they simply give up.
For the latter, what I want to say is that in the process of forming a habit, you must allow yourself to have exceptions.
For example, it is a habit to get up early, and it doesn't matter if you oversleep occasionally, just get up early tomorrow. As long as you stick to getting up early most of the time for a long period of time, it's OK. It doesn't matter if you don't get up once or twice a month. (Of course, if you have to check in in my morning group, you have to send out two red envelopes for entertainment.)
Another example is our habit of "planning early and reviewing later". You want to be entertained on Saturdays and Sundays, and you don't want to be so planned. It doesn't matter, just relax as much as you like.
When we form a habit, the purpose is not to pursue 100% accuracy of the habit itself, but to use the power of habit to make our work execute as efficiently as an automated script.
Occasionally one or two exceptions doesn't matter, fix it, and continue to execute. As long as these low-frequency exceptions do not affect the overall effect, there is no need to worry about it.
"Wrestle, Dad" and Habit Formation
In fact, it's not that difficult to develop a habit. Think about it, you already have a lot of good habits:
- brush teeth
- wash your face
- bath
- wash feet
- ……
So, you can develop new good habits! As long as you find the inner driving force, practice it step by step, let yourself see the changes, and give yourself some small rewards when there are changes. Slowly, you will make a certain thing or a certain behavior a part of you and accompany you. You go into the future together.
Finally, recommend a movie - "Wrestling, Dad":
In this inspirational film, Singer's process of training Geeta and Babita to become wrestlers is a process of habit formation. The reduction of difficulty, visualization of results, incentives, and driving forces we mentioned can all be found in it, and you can analyze them carefully when you read them.
You are welcome to leave a message at the end of the article and tell the story of what happened in the process of developing a good habit.