How to Create Great Habits- Health-Wealth-Life

Habits, everyone has heard of them, but not everyone truly understands the power of habits and how you can use them to Take Back Control.

Over the next few minutes, we will dive into creating better habits, habits that will get you moving more, focusing a bit more on your finances and helping you to improve your life 10 fold!

Firstly, what is a habit?

“Something that you do often and regularly, sometimes without knowing that you are doing it”- English Cambridge Dictionary

The definition of a habit sums it up pretty well, in fact we all have habits that we complete every single day, brushing your teeth in the morning and at night, eating dinner at roughly the same time, every day.

Driving a car is a great example, we have built up a series of habits to be able to drive from one place to the other, accelerating, breaking, changing gears, seeing brake lights ahead and braking ourselves.

All of which have been built into us as habits, from repetition, making mistakes and learning from them. Have you ever been driving your car to work, and time just flies by, you are hopping into the car, the next thing you know, you are at work. Or when you get into a “Flow” state at work, and the next thing you know, it is lunch time, but you felt like you just sat down. Another great example of completing repetitive tasks that you have built up as a habit.

That is because when you are completing a habit, your brain goes into automation mode, whereby it can complete most tasks from a subconscious level.

The reason we pack our habits into our subconscious comes down to flight and fight, as well as creating capacity for our brain to be used for much bigger problems and decisions.

What this means is that we really only truly use roughly 5% of our brain on a day to day basis to make important decisions and to create even more important habits.

Now, knowing that you have habits and that we use them every day so that you can leave the more important stuff to the conscious mind, we want to be able to use this as a way to Take Back Control of our lives and the habits we form.

To do this, we need to understand how a habit is formed in the first place, which is generally formed through what we call a “Habit Loop.”

The Habit Loop is how you Take Back Control of Life

The habit loop is very simple, in fact, our brains like things to be very simple and very repetitive, otherwise it takes a lot more energy to make new decisions or new habit loops. In the habit loop, we always start with a trigger, I have used this explanation quite a lot with nutrition clients, whereby you might start feeling bored or have nothing to do, so you open the fridge/pantry.

The trigger is feeling bored or having nothing to do at home, the routine is opening the fridge/pantry door and we can all understand what happens next…

We either crack open a “beer” or “have a snack,” even when we don’t need it, and that is the reward.

Now we know what the habit loop is, we can actually break that down and form a new habit, something that will not entail you eating every time that you are feeling bored.

You need to start at the “trigger,” which is the feeling of being bored or having nothing to do. When you feel this, you will probably find yourself in front of the pantry/fridge, about to open the door. What you need to do is stop yourself from opening the door, by asking yourself a question, “Am I really hungry?”

You need to move yourself from the subconscious to the conscious level, where you can make decisions, rather than just following habit loops you have built up over time.

If you can break the trigger, you can break down the habit and begin anew. Now the first, second, third… Even the 100th time, you may fail at breaking down the habit, especially if it is ingrained in you from a young age.

However, the key is persistence, to be able to fail and fail again, but keep trying and moving forward!

Another great example is spending money, in fact, I have seen a similar trigger bring on online shopping, whereby you may feel bored, or have nothing to do, so you open up your mobile or laptop and before you know it, you are on Amazon, Facebook or Instagram.

You are scrolling through your feed and ads keep popping up, these ads are targeted and they know your behaviours, they know that you are in a subconscious mind right now and they easily create triggers for you to begin a habit loop.

I have done marketing courses previously and I know how marketers think, they are always looking at ways to grab your attention to break the loop of scrolling and to get you to click on the product/service.

Once they have you, the likelihood of you buying and scrolling through the online store is very high, based on yur habit that you have built up and before you know it, you have spent $100-$500.

Again, to break the habit, you need to stop it at the trigger, to be able to do this, you need to leave your subconscious mind and move back into the conscious mind, which the brain does not like to do to conserve energy on the bigger decisions.

Hopefully, by delving into how habits are formed, you will be able to use this as a way to start breaking down some of your own habits that you want to stop doing. Which could be anything from smoking, to playing games all night, to alcohol, to eating too many snacks, to spending too much money.

You will most likely fail at the start, breaking down a very old habit is even harder to do, so I suggest that you start with a recently built habit, something that you have only just started doing. You will have to think on this, ask loved ones even, because you may not even realise you are doing it…

Once you have your first habit that you want to break, you will need to work hard to break it, because you are literally fighting against yourself!

The key is to be persistent and be okay with failure, see each and every failing as a lesson to be learnt and to strive to get better!

If you are in need of a bit of help trying to break down this habit, you can reach out to me anytime, just send me through a message on any of the social platforms,

Until Next Time,

Take Back Control