2020 Best 6 Ways To Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

    

    Habits are absolutely critical because we have habits that we have planned out that we want to do things that we purposeful Unfortunately most of our habits are done automatically. They're on a pilot and the habits that we have are not serving us very well but they become so ingrained in what we do every single day that we tend to find it's very hard to break free And when we do want to break free of them even though we know it's not serving us we don't want to do it Why? Because of habits, It's an atomic habit Atomic habits is all about recognizing the bad habits your life and help you set up the right habits, habits that serve you, habits that will help you be more resilient Habits that will help you get more done, be more productive That what I'm interested in. And so any book that will help me understand habits a little bit more I'm totally interested in it. So, why don't we crack into this one? Atomic habits an easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones Let's kick this off. 

    Golden Nugget number one: The Smallest habits can have the most profound effect on your life Imagine for a second a flight that's taking off from LA to NY Ok, this flight going up It's cruising. Things are going well. But the pilot just decides to shift things like a foot and a half, not much What do you think happens by the time you want to hit your destination in NY? Well, when you get off the plane, you're gonna be very surprised to find that you're not in NY but instead, you're in Washington D.C and you say, well, Ryan, how is that possible? He moved it may be just like two feet How is that possible Because what happens is when you make small changes over the long haul, it creates a big impact. You might not even notice it. Nobody in that plane will notice the change You made that small change and you saw it through Its change or you ended up So why do I tell that story? I tell you this story because it's the small habits that you create today that will drive lasting change. You might not notice it And because we don't notice it, that's often why we stop And why we way this new habit don't serve me well, no. Remember the flight from LA to NY? 

    It's gonna throw you in Washington DC, Because you just made a small little shift You're trying to save up money, you put five dollars away every single week You put away 10 dollars a week, whatever. You put a small amount of money down every single week And you look at it the end of the year and you're like, wow, that was not a whole heck of a lot of money I got maybe 500 dollars here Big deal. Like what 500 dollars? Keep that going and you'll see how that serves you well. The most important thing here is persistence and consistency when you creating a new habit Persistence and consistency, That goes for anything. Running the business, trying to lose weight, trying to pay the bills, whatever it is. Persistence and consistency are so important when you're trying to develop a new habit. And so the big takeaway here is that the tiniest of change has a dramatic impact, but we're not patient enough, be confident in the direction you're going, And just keep moving. 

    Golden Nugget number 2: Habits are automatic behaviors that are learned from experience When you come home late at night, Your house is dark. What do you do when you first walk in the door? You look for the light switch and you turn on. That is an automated behavior. That's a habit Why do we do that? What are the intricacies that make us do that? You might say, well, Ryan, it makes sense I can't see I want to turn on the light. Exactly And understanding why we do that. Understanding the mechanics of that is how you are going to understand habits more. Behaviors that give satisfying consequences tend to be repeated until they become automatic. Now that is incredibly important for us to know because it helps us understand habits more it helps us understand that if there's a reward and if we recognize the reward, our habit is a greater chance of sticking. 

    And so, now let's understand the mechanics of the habit. When we talk about habits, Habits begin with a cue. Walking into a dark room, it cues you to perform an action that's going to enable you to see inside the room because you have craving for change. This change in states you want to be able to see. So now you have your response. Your response is the action I flip the switch so I can see Next comes to the reward. And the reward is the comfort of the safety The ability to see that is your reward All right, so your reward doesn't necessarily have the big thing It's sometimes just the simplest things So that it's your cue, your response, and your reward 

    Golden nugget number 3:When you creating a new habit make sure you have hard to miss cues and plan the action So your phone goes off. What do you do? You pick up the phone obviously it's your responsibility. You go ahead You look at it. There you go. You get rid of your fear of missing out. That cue is hard to miss It's always there. That's why we form habits So now that we know that hard to miss cue are important What hard to miss cues are you setting up in your life to help support healthy habits or to get you away from bad habits? One of the easiest things you can do is change your surroundings, change the environment you're in to encourage a more healthy habit. 

    So if you want to learn guitar, put your guitar in the middle of your room It's gonna be hard to miss that if you're trying to eat better, to eat more salads and more vegetables, then out that big bowl of vegetables or fruits in the middle of your kitchen You gonna be more likely to snack on that than you will be looking for a bag of chips. So change your surroundings, change your environment to support your habits You implementation intentions are what's going to make the difference between you talking about it and you actually do it An implementation intention, it introduces a clear plan of action setting out when and where you'll carry out the habit that you want to cultivate And research shows this works. So research was done but the United States but they found this study with voters where when people are asked, are you going to vote, people say, yes, of course, I'm gonna go vote, but they didn't vote. 

    So when asked another question. Two questions. What time are you gonna vote? And at what station are you going to vote? When asked those two question, people were more likely to vote because they had a more specific plan of action in place So for yourself, when you say instead of saying I'm going to go out and jog more I'm going to eat better More specific I'm going to go out and I'm on a jog ai 8 am, as soon as I wake up on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and hold your self accountable to that Get rid of the vagueness That's not serving you, it's not helping you create a new habit. 

    Golden Nugget number 4: Humans are motivated by the anticipation of reward. So used to create new habits. In 1954, neuroscientists Jame Olds and Peter Milter, they ran an experiment. They attached these electrodes to these rat's brains that essentially blocked the neurotransmitter dopamine from being released in the brain. What did they find? They found that in a very short period of time, these rats lose the will to live. They didn't eat it in a drink, they didn't have sex. In a few days, they just died. And so it really shined a light on the importance of dopamine to drive us to take action. And the cool thing here is that dopamine can be released in your brain by doing certain actions, such as eating food, listening to good music Not only is it by doing the action, but by thinking about the action that also releases dopamine. So by thinking about getting that piece of food by thinking about listening to good music, your brain is automatically releasing dopamine as well. 

    That is the brain's way of trying to drive you to action. And we can use that to our advantage when forming new habits. The great technique that is shared in the book is called Temptation Bundling and that's when you take a behavior that you know is important, but you're not really looking forward to it but you link it to behavior that you're drawn to, one that generates that motivation dopamine hit. Take, for example, the gym, right? you don't want to go to the gym. How do we use this technique of temptation bundling to help form a new habit? What about the music you listen to? 

    What if you only allowed yourself to listen to music a certain album, certain music when you went to the gym. you couldn't wait to go to the gym because you can't wait to listen to that music Would you get certain podcast that you wanted to listen to level into these podcasts, but you only allow yourself to listen to them go you go to the gym? Temptation bundling. Find pleasurable activity. Something that supports you and ties that to something maybe isn't so fun to do. The gym temptation building is a very important technique that we need to make use of. 

    Golden number 5:If you want to create new habits make the habit as easy as possible to adopt Forming new habits that are easy, sometimes it's just like take no effort. Pick up the phone scrolling through and create that habit of every time it goes, ding and I go ahead and I look at my notification it's doesn't take any effort for me to do, And yet I spend hours upon hours on my phone every single week. So do you But do the hard stuff. Go to the gym, learn a new language, do business development, do your accounting, all of that stuff is very hard and you don't necessarily want to do it. So we've kind of already started to talk about different things that we could do different techniques. 

    Here's the new technique. Reduce friction. If you're trying to form a new habit, reduce the friction that prevents you from doing it. So the question to ask yourself is what friction do you have that prevent you from working out? What friction do you have that prevents you from eating right? If you're not eating right and you're sitting there eating garbage, you're thinking about junk food. Maybe you have too much friction. Maybe you don't have the right food there Maybe. Then do your meal prep. That's why meal prep is so important, there's no friction. You've done the meal prep It's sitting in the fridge. You're hungry Instead of going for that bag of chips or ordering something online ordering a pizza, You have food in the fridge. It reduces friction. 

    The second trick for making habits easier to stick and make them long term is something that the author calls the 2-minute rule. And it's a way to make any new activity feel manageable. The two-minute drill says, listen if you're trying to go to the gym or you're trying to just read more, go and put on your gym shoes, commit to reading two pages. That's it, just commit to the bare bones. Once you've pulled on your running shoes you'll probably head out for a run. Once you've read two pages, you're likely to continue. The rule recognizes that simply getting started is the first and most important step towards doing something right. At last but not least. 

    Golden number 6: To make your habits long term it needs to be immediately satisfying This is an interesting one because I've always looked at habits not to be immediately satisfying, but I looked at the long term. I looked at where I was going, why I was doing it, and that vision, that direction I was going in. That's what fueled my habits. If we want to form a new habit, it needs to be immediately satisfying. So what are you doing to make your new habit immediately satisfying? We live in this world today that academics call a delayed return environment where you go to work today, but you don't get compensated for the work today You get compensated two weeks time. 

    You go to the gym today, but you don't lose weight overnight. It takes time. And our brains evolved to cope with the immediate return environment of earlier humans who weren't thinking about long-term things like we are like savings or losing weight. For them, it was going out, killing that animal, bringing that boar back, and feeding the family. So when you're pursuing habits with a delayed return, try to attach some immediate gratification to them Use immediate gratification to your advantage. Edit subtitles: Hana Lee Subtitles by the Amara.org community