"Instead of focusing on cultivating self-discipline, introduce rituals similar to brushing your teeth. Incremental change is better than ambitious failure. Success feeds off of itself."
~Tal Ben-Shahar, Happier
Instead of me re-creating the wheel, here are a few tips already out there for you to consider on Day 3 or our 30 Day SHED. Create a good habit, break a bad one!
We can do it!!!
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Tips to Creating Daily Habits for the Long-Term
1) You must practice your new habit each day consistently for the first 21 days ~
You’ve probably heard this one before, but scientifically, it has been proven as true. If you don’t perform your new daily habit every single day for 21 days, chances are, you won’t keep it. It will never become as ingrained as something like brushing your teeth. It is easier to stay consistent during the first 21 days if you perform the habit at the same time each day.
2) To succeed, you must be accountable to yourself ~
You aren’t always going to have someone else to be accountable to. So be accountable to yourself! I’ve found it is easiest to do this by keeping a daily log tracking my progress in maintaining positive habits.
3) To succeed, you must accept yourself ~
Should you give up the first day you don’t perform your positive habit? Of course not- you are only human. Accept yourself in your present moment, while understanding that your future self will be better-able to maintain the positive habit. Then move on without looking back.
That’s it. Now you get to keep the results of your positive habit for the long-term. I’ve tried this, and it works. After 21 days of practicing the new daily habit, if you keep yourself accountable, and are accepting of your mistakes, you will succeed. It’s best to try it with one habit at a time. Your daily habit will then become so ingrained in your daily schedule that not performing it will be like not brushing your teeth.
http://www.lifeevolver.com/create-daily-habits-consistent-21-days/
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18 Tricks To Make New Habits Stick
With a small amount of initial discipline, you can create a new habit that requires little effort to maintain. Here are some tips for creating new habits and making them stick:
1. Commit to Thirty Days – Three to four weeks is all the time you need to make a habit automatic. If you can make it through the initial conditioning phase, it becomes much easier to sustain. A month is a good block of time to commit to a change since it easily fits in your calendar.
2. Make it Daily – Consistency is critical if you want to make a habit stick. If you want to start exercising, go to the gym every day for your first thirty days. Going a couple times a week will make it harder to form the habit. Activities you do once every few days are trickier to lock in as habits.
3. Start Simple – Don’t try to completely change your life in one day. It is easy to get over-motivated and take on too much. If you wanted to study two hours a day, first make the habit to go for thirty minutes and build on that.
4. Remind Yourself – Around two weeks into your commitment it can be easy to forget. Place reminders to execute your habit each day or you might miss a few days. If you miss time it defeats the purpose of setting a habit to begin with.
5. Stay Consistent – The more consistent your habit the easier it will be to stick. If you want to start exercising, try going at the same time, to the same place for your thirty days. When cues like time of day, place and circumstances are the same in each case it is easier to stick.
6. Get a Buddy – Find someone who will go along with you and keep you motivated if you feel like quitting.
7. Form a Trigger – A trigger is a ritual you use right before executing your habit. If you wanted to wake up earlier, this could mean waking up in exactly the same way each morning. If you wanted to quit smoking you could practice snapping your fingers each time you felt the urge to pick up a cigarette.
8. Replace Lost Needs - If you are giving up something in your habit, make sure you are adequately replacing any needs you’ve lost. If watching television gave you a way to relax, you could take up meditation or reading as a way to replace that same need.
9. Be Imperfect – Don’t expect all your attempts to change habits to be successful immediately. It took me four independent tries before I started exercising regularly. Now I love it. Try your best, but expect a few bumps along the way.
10. Use “But” – A prominent habit changing therapist once told me this great technique for changing bad thought patterns. When you start to think negative thoughts, use the word “but” to interrupt it. “I’m no good at this, but, if I work at it I might get better later.”
11. Remove Temptation - Restructure your environment so it won’t tempt you in the first thirty days. Remove junk food from your house, cancel your cable subscription, throw out the cigarettes so you won’t need to struggle with willpower later.
12. Associate With Role Models - Spend more time with people who model the habits you want to mirror. A recent study found that having an obese friend indicated you were more likely to become fat. You become what you spend time around.
13. Run it as an Experiment - Withhold judgment until after a month has past and use it as an experiment in behavior. Experiments can’t fail, they just have different results so it will give you a different perspective on changing your habit.
14. Swish - A technique from NLP. Visualize yourself performing the bad habit. Next visualize yourself pushing aside the bad habit and performing an alternative. Finally, end that sequence with an image of yourself in a highly positive state. See yourself picking up the cigarette, see yourself putting it down and snapping your fingers, finally visualize yourself running and breathing free. Do it a few times until you automatically go through the pattern before executing the old habit.
15. Write it Down – A piece of paper with a resolution on it isn’t that important. Writing that resolution is. Writing makes your ideas more clear and focuses you on your end result.
16. Know the Benefits - Familiarize yourself with the benefits of making a change. Get books that show the benefits of regular exercise. Notice any changes in energy levels after you take on a new diet. Imagine getting better grades after improving your study habits.
17. Know the Pain – You should also be aware of the consequences. Exposing yourself to realistic information about the downsides of not making a change will give you added motivation.
18. Do it For Yourself - Don’t worry about all the things you “should” have as habits. Instead tool your habits towards your goals and the things that motivate you. Weak guilt and empty resolutions aren’t enough.
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/18-tricks-to-make-new-habits-stick.html
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Installing a new habit and breaking an old one
by Dr Stephanie A. Burns
Making an action a habit requires very little knowledge of the cognitive activity of motivation.
To create a new habit there a only a few steps and these are steps we all possess the firepower to do.
1. You have to decide on what you want to be a habit. It is important that you be as specific as possible. A habit of drinking more water is problematic whereas a habit of drinking 6 glasses a day is easier to install.
2. You have to set up triggers to help you remember the action at the time you want to do it.
It is hard to install a new habit if you keep ending up at the end of the day remembering that you were meaning to take the stairs at work instead of the elevator.
During the time before the action becomes a habit (perhaps the first few weeks) you will need to use external triggers or reminders. Make it easy to remember what you are trying to do.
Alarms, notes, friends to call you, rubber bands on your wrist, padlocks or obstacles.
Rituals support remembering - do it in the same place, same time, same surroundings if possible for the first few weeks.
3. Once you have remembered you have to be able to motivate yourself to act. Before we discuss how to do that we should discuss the issue of repetition.
Installing new behaviours of any type take repetition over time. How much repetition and for how long depends on what it is you are trying to install.
One consideration is the size of the action. For simple habits of short duration - getting up earlier, making lunch for your children the night before, doing a load of laundry every morning, saving small change everyday, riding your bike to work, writing in a journal - you would do the entire action. For activities of longer duration you will need another step.
Let's say you want to go for a walk every morning for one hour. Great habit, but hard to do because of the component of length of time needed. To install these types of habits is to understand that the habit you need first is to get up and get out the door. The thought of an hour walk can undermine your best efforts to fight the avoidance strategies from kicking in. You can circumvent this by installing the habit of getting up in the morning and heading out the door.
Keep the walk short in the beginning, say ten minutes. Do that everyday for a couple of weeks until that habit is firmly installed. Then expand to the hour of walking - that will be the easy part. Also, by doing this you add a wonderful natural motivation component - that of anticipation. We are highly motivated to do things we are denying ourselves. So, if you say ten minutes a day, don't do twenty minutes. You will bungle the motivation that comes with anticipation.
This goes for any habit that you are creating that is being built over time - like doing 20 push-ups or a hundred sit-ups or saving money.
Start very small, get the habit of starting handled, then build.
A second consideration is the number of repetitions.
An action you will take everyday or even many times a day will take only two to three weeks to install. An activity that you will only do once a week but have decided should be a habit because it is something you want to do for a long time can take up to twelve weeks to install.
Installing a habit is not energy free. It costs you the commitment to the action for the few weeks it takes. It is a 'whatever' it takes to not miss (of course, if you do miss - don't beat yourself up, life is long and there is more than enough time to get it right. You learn from each attempt. Just make the next attempt now, not later).
Call on a friend.
Do whatever it takes!
Strategies for motivating yourself to take the action:
Asking a friend to come by every day to do it with you.
Promise yourself a reward for each action.
Find someone you would not want to disappoint and make a promise to them.
Think hard about how bad you will feel if you do not do it.
Remember why the habit is important - what is the long term benefit.
Notice every positive step and change, no matter how small!
Make it hard to not do - set up obstacles and barriers so it is almost impossible to not do.
Block your on-going movement.
Or, make it easy to do - put it in your path.
Delay the decision to not act - tell yourself to just start and then decide if you want to continue.
To break a habit make what you are doing very hard to do.
Remember to pat yourself on the back for every success in the right direction no matter how small.
Notice and acknowledge what is working
Spend the time you beat yourself for not doing what you should be doing by doing what you should be doing.
Look for the smallest of improvements in your actions.
One less is one less, one minute more is one minute more.
Celebrate all successful behaviours no matter how small the change.
It all is in the right direction and changing behaviour is hard.
Acknowledging what you have done
Get off the fear of looking silly. It is not useful and none of the people who care about how you look are going to be important to you in the future. Don't make decisions that relate to getting what you want be dependent on the thoughts of others.
DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO DO THE TASK FOR THE FIRST FEW WEEKS.
This is NOT EASY, but the reward is worth it. In a few weeks you will be doing it WITHOUT THINKING ABOUT IT. IT IS JUST SOMETHING YOU DO LIKE FEEDING THE DOG.
Make the bad stuff hard to get to
and the good stuff easy!
Keep it simple for the first go. It is just to learn about the process of creating a habit. Once you know how, then you can tackle bigger things.
ALWAYS REMEMBER:
The only way to fail to this is to fail to initiate the first action.
Acknowledging successes count. Admonishing yourself for failures is useless.
Never think you are bad, or weak, if this is hard. Behaviour is based on innate tendencies and you are following well ingrained patterns in humans. It is just that as a human you have options about your approaches and can choose useful ones over useless ones.
http://www.stephanieburns.com/articles/article06_habit.asp
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10 Easy Ways to Make Exercise a Habit
Try these tricks to become one of the fitness faithful
By Leanna Skarnulis, WebMD
Let's face it: it's not all that difficult to start a fitness routine. After all, most of us have done it more than once.
The trouble, of course, comes with sticking with it. All too often, our initial enthusiasm and energy wanes, we get distracted by other things going on in our lives, or we don't think we're seeing results quickly enough -- and we throw in the towel.
Yet many people do manage to hang in there, and would no sooner skip their regular workout than their morning shower. What's their secret?
A recent study by researcher Diane Klein, PhD, shed some light on the subject. Long-term exercisers (who had been working out for an average of 13 years) were asked to rank what motivated them to keep up with their regimes.
Their answers might surprise you. The exercisers were not as concerned with powerful pecs and awesome abs as they were with feeling good and being healthy.
Here's how the study participants ranked their motivators:
Fitness
Feelings of well-being
Pep and energy
Enjoyment of the exercise
Making exercise a priority
Sleeping better
Feeling alert
Being relaxed
Weight management
Appearance
So, once you have your priorities in the right place, how can you become one of the fitness faithful?
WebMD has compiled 10 tips for making fitness a habit in your life. To create the list, we sought the help of Klein, along with long-term fitness buff Roy Stevens and his wife, Wanda, who is transforming her hit-and-miss exercise schedule into an almost-daily habit.
1. Do a variety of activities you enjoy. And remember, there's no rule that says you have to go to a gym or buy equipment.
"We've shifted our perceptions from regimented exercise to physical activity," says Klein, assistant professor of exercise, sports and leisure studies, and director of gerontology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Having a variety of activities -- weight lifting, walking, running, tennis, cycling, aerobics classes -- will ensure that you can do something regardless of the weather or time of day.
2. Commit to another person. "The social aspect of exercise is important for me," says Wanda Stevens, a stay-at-home mom in Austin, Texas. "I'll let myself off, but if I've agreed to walk with a friend after dinner, I won't let them down."
She is six weeks into an exercise program, thanks in part to her husband's support. Roy Stevens, who works as a management consultant, has become her "in-house personal trainer." They work out together every morning, doing a combination of aerobics, strength training, Tae Bo, and stretching. If he's out of town, he gives her a wake-up call, and she takes the dog for a walk.
3. Make exercise a priority. "It has to be a non-negotiable," says Roy Stevens. He began exercising to manage his weight when he was in the Air Force band some 20 years ago. "We'd travel, and other guys would get off the bus and go eat wings and drink beer. I'd go running." He's maintained the exercise habit even during his years working 70 hours a week as a restaurant owner.
There's another advantage to making exercise non-negotiable. Friends and family members learn that it's part of your identity, and give up saying things like, "Why don't you take it easy today?"
4. Exercise first thing in the morning. With two preschool children, Wanda Stevens couldn't find time to work out except on a hit-and-miss basis. Any number of things could sabotage her good intentions to walk or go to Pilates class after dinner. But all her excuses vanished once she started getting up before the kids so she could work out.
"I didn't think I was a morning person," she tells WebMD. "But it's working for me."
Experts agree that a morning schedule is best. "If you go to a gym, it should be located between your home and work," says Klein. "Exercise, take a shower, and you're energized for the day."
5. Or, exercise on your way home from work. The next best thing to exercising first thing in the morning is to do it on your way home from work, Klein says.
"Don't go home first," she says. "I learned that the hard way. There aren't a lot of people who are so motivated that after they go home and change clothes will go back out again and exercise."
6. Exercise even when you're "too tired." Chances are, you'll feel better after exercising.
"It energizes us," says Klein. "You breathe deeply, and your body makes better use of the oxygen exchange. You'll get an exercise-induced euphoria during the activity and for some time after."
If Wanda Stevens thinks she is too tired to get up and exercise, Roy shows her no sympathy. "She gets mad, but then she feels better afterwards," he says.
7. Log your activity. Write down the things that are important to you. It could be how much time you exercise each day, how many steps you walked, how far you ran or cycled, what you weighed, etc.
Some people make a game of it. You may have heard of runners calculating the miles it would take to run from their homes to Boston (home of the famous marathon), figuring how far they run in an average week and setting a target date for "arriving" in Boston.
8. Be aware of all the indicators of progress. It's great when your clothes fit better and you can lift heavier weights or work out longer without getting exhausted.
But there are a slew of other progress indicators, such as:
Getting a good night's sleep.
Thinking more clearly.
Having more energy.
Realizing your muscles aren't screaming after you've helped a friend move furniture.
Seeing your resting heart rate drop over time.
Hearing your doctor congratulate you on improved cholesterol, blood pressure, bone density, triglycerides, and blood sugars.
9. Walk -- with a pedometer (or a dog). "If you enjoy walking and haven't exercised for awhile, 10 minutes three times a day will give you 30 minutes," says Klein.
Use a pedometer, and work up to at least 10,000 steps a day. "Nobody starts out with 10,000 steps," Klein says. Find out what your daily average is, and, the next week, strive to walk 300 extra steps each day. Increase your steps each week.
"Better yet, walk the dog," Klein says. That's how she motivated her sister to exercise. "Twice a day she walks her dog, which is good for them both and provides companionship."
Wanda Stevens also enjoys walking her border collie and finds there's another benefit: "It relieves the guilt I felt over not giving her enough attention now that we have kids."
10. Reward yourself. Are you telling yourself that you don't deserve a reward for something you should be doing anyway -- or that once you can zip your jeans without lying on the bed, that will be reward enough? Well, honestly, how inspiring is that?
Experts say that making behavior changes is hard, and rewards motivate. So decide on a goal and a reward, and work toward it. You might buy yourself a video you've wanted after you stick to your fitness plan for one month, or buy new walking shoes when you achieve 5,000 steps a day. Do whatever works for you.
http://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/guide/exercise-habits
