Good intentions to take care of your health can dissolve into the hustle and bustle of everyday life. The advice of Wendy Wood, psychologist and author of Habit Formation, will help anyone develop and reinforce desired behaviors effortlessly.
Develop healthy habits — what could be more beneficial for ourselves? But let’s face it: despite good intentions, keeping fit and healthy in our busy world can be quite a challenge. However, studies have shown that it is not at all necessary to have strong willpower in order to adhere to good habits. Three simple life hacks will help along the way and even make it easy and joyful.
“Habits develop from what you do, not from your decisions or ideas,” explains Professor Wendy Wood, author of Good Habits, Bad Habits. “Habits are how the mind works by coding your behavior.”
Wendy’s research revealed three simple ways to form healthy habits.
1.Context creation
The concept of «context» refers to the entire world around us. It includes our location, the people around us, the time of day, and even the activities we perform. In the same way that professional chefs carefully organize the kitchen first, organizing convenient storage of utensils and products so that later it will be easier to cook, we can organize our context so that it is easy for us to repeat the same thing over and over again.
For example, we want to develop the habit of taking a lunch break every day and eating healthy food away from the computer. In this case, we can invite a colleague to have lunch together and, supporting each other, get up together and go out to a cafe that cooks healthy food, not fast food. We often do not realize how much our actions depend on the environment and pressure from the outside, but all this directly affects our habits.
2.Regular repetition
The action is quickly remembered when we find ourselves in the same context again. The habit will be strengthened only if we are consistent. It’s not enough to just do something a few times: Research shows that it can take six to nine months of regular repetition to form a habit.
This may mean that there is a risk of losing motivation over time. So it’s important to stick to the habits we really want to build into our lives and the experiences we want to experience and appreciate time after time.
3. Rewards for changes
Context will make the path easier and repetition will start the engine, but unless we receive even a small reward for our efforts along the way, we will not have an incentive to move on. To help form habits, the reward must be significant—more and better than what we have already trained ourselves to do.
Why? Because unexpected rewards stimulate the release of dopamine, imprinting the details of a rewarding experience into memory and making the behavior more likely to be repeated. This creates a habit that is energizing and inspiring to take action that has positive consequences and is aligned with our goals. So if we want to exercise more but hate going to the gym, we’ll never be fitness kings… Unless something positive is added to our workouts, like watching videos or listening to podcasts while working out. If it delivers pleasant emotions, the habit is formed faster.
And if, despite everything, we find that the plan for forming healthy habits has not yet been completed, Wendy suggests that we experiment a little more.
We can take an already developed habit and replace it with something similar, but more relevant to our goals.
- Habits «trailer»: you can try to introduce a new habit, taking advantage of an existing one, to reinforce a healthy behavior. For example, if we need to take vitamins, we can put them next to our toothbrush or coffee maker so that every morning we get an automatic signal: “I brush my teeth and take my vitamins” or “I make myself coffee and take my vitamins.” This is more effective than relying only on memory and willpower.
- Habit change: we can take an already developed habit and replace it with something similar, but more relevant to our goals. For example, if we want to stop drinking sugary soda, we can buy bottled water or mineral water. The packaging is almost the same, bought in the same place, and we bring it home and drink it in similar situations, only without harm to health. Since we already have a habit formed, it is much easier to switch from one product to another.
If we want, we can easily apply these simple life hacks to form healthy habits that will help us feel better and take better care of ourselves.