Build positive habits, break unhelpful routines and take small, consistent steps towards the life you want.
We’ve been thinking about forming positive habits recently because it’s struck us how much bad habits get in the way of living a good life and reaching our dreams. And yes, we know that’s to state the obvious, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t think about it.
After all, can we seriously look at our lives and say that it’s made up of good habits with no bad habits?
Not us either. And we want to be better. We want to move forward, improving ourselves, chasing the dream and making the world a better place. That’s what Dream Runner stands for.
But that’s all talk if we don’t actually do something. So let’s look at how we can actually form habits effectively.
Put in simple terms, a habit is a learned behaviour that happens automatically when a cue takes place.
Knowing that it is a learned behaviour is particularly powerful because it points to the fact that you are not powerless before a bad habit and that you can set up good habits.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that it is easy to do either of those things. Breaking a bad habit is difficult because it is so deeply ingrained that it is an automatic response. Setting up a new habit is hard because you’re trying to teach yourself to do something without thinking about it.
Having said this, we can look at what we can do positively to form a habit.
The absolute basics of habit formation are identifying a cue for the desired behaviour. You then need to be hypervigilant for the cue and carry out the desired behaviour every time you notice the cue.
Then it’s a matter of repetition until your response is automatic.
A simple example would be something like waking up in the morning and deliberately avoiding your phone for half an hour by going to stretch. You waking up is the cue, the stretching is the desired behaviour (while avoiding your phone).
If you do this consistently, you will eventually start to do it without thinking about it and your flexibility and core strength will benefit.
You’ll see all sorts of numbers from 21 days to 254 days, but the truth is that there is no specific timeframe because the factors that go into solidifying a habit are repetition, complexity and consistency.
The example we used above (stretching and neglecting your phone) would take considerably longer than trying to form the habit of drinking a glass of water every hour because you can only wake up and stretch once a day, whereas you will be able to drink a glass of water on the hour multiple times a day.
Apart from that, drinking a glass of water requires much less effort and is far simpler than a stretching routine. And added to that is the fact that consistency on the stretching could prove difficult, especially on a cold winter’s Sunday…
So the simpler the behaviour, the more frequently you do it and the more frequently you do it, the faster you will be able to for the habit.
We’ve now established the basic principles of forming habits, but there are also things that you can do to help you set that positive habit in stone. We’d like to point to the excellent work of Spencer Greenberg who held a study to find out what really makes a difference in forming habits.
In order of effectiveness, he and his team found that the following things had a significant positive effect on forming habits:
To do this, you the following three things:
Mini habits are smaller, simpler versions of your normal habit that you can do on days when you don’t have time to carry out the full habit (like a few simple and quick stretches for those cold, rainy winter Sundays instead of the full routine, or a quick swig of water instead of drinking an entire glass)
Interestingly, this is most beneficial for people who aren’t as highly motivated to form the habit.
In addition to that, he and his team found that motivation was very important in a person’s ability to form a habit. We found this interesting because there are a lot of people who say that motivation is meaningless.
So we can conclude that motivation plus consistently and repeatedly practicing a behaviour in response to a chosen cue while using the above tricks to help you along seems to be the winning formula for maximising your chances of forming the habits you want.
Of course, you can use this to replace a bad habit as well.
Our challenge to you is to kill one bad habit that’s holding you back from your goal by replacing it with a positive one that will shift the needle to the goal. And if you like, hit us up to share how you’ve taken another step towards your dream.
Let’s do it.
