How Habits Transform Your Life: The Power of Habits
Trigger, action, reward
Trigger, action, reward
Trigger, action, reward
For better or worse, this is how habits are formed. These triggers come in many forms including sights, sounds, emotions, the time of day, or even thought patterns.
The action that follows this trigger gives us a reward in the form of dopamine, which wires our brain to want more. As you do this more and more, your trigger/action/reward centers begin to take notice. Just like Pavlov’s dog you start forming habits.
Habits are powerful and can transform your world. Over time, your habits determine how successful and how happy you are.
In this article, I explain why habits are so powerful in shaping our lives and how you can use habits to live happy and free.
Three Reasons Habits Are Powerful
1. Time
Time is your most precious resource: no amount of money can buy back your youth, and no amount of wishing can turn back time.
Not only is time our most valuable resource, but it’s also the most powerful. Your habits, repeated over and over again shape your entire life.
Over time, your actions become magnified. The couple extra calories you eat and the fewer extra minutes spent working on a skill all add up. Before you know it, you start living a whole new life. You look back and don’t even recognize your old self anymore, for better or worse.
If you have a beer after work everyday to “take the edge off”, soon you won’t know what to do if you don’t have a beer after work. You become a slave to yourself. On the other hand, if you come home every day and workout, you’ll maintain a healthy body and mind. You’ll form a routine that positively enhances your life, and your confidence will run high.
The small actions you take on a daily basis don’t seem to add up to much. But given enough time, as time slowly creeps up, they can change your entire life.
2. Habits Rewire Your Brain
Think of the last time you did something new. Maybe it was starting a new job, going out to meet new friends, or going to a yoga class you haven’t been to before. How did you feel? If I had to guess, you felt a combination of excitement, anxiety, wonder, uncomfortability, and maybe a small amount of imposter syndrome.
Seeking discomfort causes your brain to fire neurons in places they haven’t been before. By making yourself vulnerable to new activities, you open new gateways in your life. These new gateways enter your life as new opportunities.
Over time, as you continue exposing yourself to new experiences, your brain recognizes this neuron pathway. You aren’t so nervous, and you become more comfortable and confident in your actions. Your brain has “been there” and “done that.”
Not only do you exercise that new neuron pathway of working out, meeting new people, or practicing a skill, but your mind becomes comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Being comfortable being uncomfortable is a superpower anyone can achieve. You just need to do some rewiring.
3. Your Habits Become Automatic
How many times have you opened up your phone, went to an app, and started scrolling, only to realize you did all that without even thinking? I know I’ve caught myself doing this before.
If that doesn’t tell you how scary other bad habits can be, I don’t know what will.
The psychology behind this is simple: you first receive a notification on your phone. It’s generally something that raises your spirit or makes you happy, even if only temporarily. At that moment, your mind correlates the buzzing and *dinging* of your phone to the dopamine receptors in your brain.
Trigger, action, reward.
Repeated several times a day over several weeks, and you now have a new habit, whether you like it or not. A majority of your daily actions happen without you even realizing. These automatic actions are why habits are so powerful.
If you can transform your brain into automatically doing habits that are good for your overall well-being, then you’ve successfully unlocked the power of habits.
What habits are taking place in your life?
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
Will Durant
How to Form Good Habits
Forming new habits is like trying to roll a big heavy ball across a flat field. It seems almost impossible at first, but once it starts budging, you gain more confidence in yourself and your progress. Get the ball rolling with these four steps below:
1. Be Real With Yourself
“The first step to solving a problem is admitting you have a problem.”
If you constantly justify your actions to yourself or others, then you’ll never see real change in your life.
Nobody is perfect, and you aren’t the exception. Everyone has their own demons in life to face. The only courageous thing to do is own up to it and conquer them.
The best way to be real with yourself? Get to know yourself. Find out what it is you want from life.
2. Make a Specific Action Plan
So you know what you want from life, but what now?
The next step is to create an action plan.
Specifically write down what goal(s) you have. “Being rich and retiring before I get old” isn’t good enough.
“Having a net worth of $5 million by the time I’m 50 years old” is more specific, and therefore much better.
Once you have a goal, break it down into three smaller goals. Break these smaller goals into baby steps. Turn these baby steps into daily habits.
This way, your goal seems more attainable and within your grasp. as long as you’re complete your daily habits, you’re on the right track
3. Be Persistent
Being persistent is the hardest but most rewarding part of this process.
The best way to be consistent day after day, week after week, is to make your habit so easy that you can’t possibly go without doing it.
For example, if you want to be a better writer, make it your goal to write 3 sentences a day.
If you want to make more friends, make it your goal to say one thing to one stranger per day.
Make your goals so easy to accomplish, and you’ll eventually slip into going above and beyond.
Persistence and time go hand in hand, and as we’ve seen above, time is the most powerful resource you have. With persistence and enough time, anything is possible.
4. Bonus: Reward Yourself!
This last step is optional, but I highly recommend it to keep morale high.
If your goal is to eat healthier, and you’ve gone all week without eating junk food, reward yourself! Go out for a small vanilla ice cream cone at your local creamery Sunday afternoon. Use this to release any built-up tension you may have had throughout the week.
This in itself will form a habit. By giving your brain a dopamine rush as Sunday comes closer, you train yourself to be diligent the other six days of the week. You give yourself a chance at changing for the better.
You’re supposed to have fun with life, so find ways to reward yourself for your hard work.
The Power of Habits Summary
Habits are powerful. They can make or break your life:
Over time
Through re-wiring your brain
By doing them automatically
Take advantage of them by:
Being real with yourself
Making a specific action plan
Being persistent
Rewarding yourself in small ways for your dedication
This isn’t a “get rich quick scheme.” It won’t be all sunshine and rainbows. But if you truly believe in yourself, there’s no limit to what you canaccopmlish.
