This is kind of crazy, my first blog post! Both exciting and nerve-racking. Today I chose to share how I build healthy habits in my daily life in just 3 easy and simple steps.
Building a habit sounds hard. You’re told it takes 60 days to build a good habit. It sounds like such a long time, doesn’t it? What if I told you it is so much easier to build a habit than you think, you make habits all the time without even thinking about it.
Step 1: Figure Out the habit you want to build
This is the most important step, what habit do you want to add into your life? What habit could you create to complete a goal? Make the habit as specific as possible, for example instead of “I want to wake up early” say “I am going to wake up at 5:30 am then make my bed, and then get ready”. This makes it easier for you to build a habit.
Step 2: Figure out what your trigger, action, and reward is
Once you know the healthy habit you want to create you can find out what triggers you to start that habit, for example, I want to get things done and get a head start on the day. Then you have the action, to get a head start on the day, I would need to wake earlier than I already do. Now you need the reward. For example, when I wake up early I watch Netflix for 15 minutes before getting out of bed. Having the reward will make you want to do the action even more.
Step 3: Don’t set yourself up for failure
Make the action as easy as possible for you to complete, it needs to be a physical action(it doesn’t have to bet). Continuing with the example, I would put my alarm on the other side of the room, so when I wake up I have to get out of bed to turn off the alarm.
I tried these steps and I went from waking up at 10 am to waking up at 5:30 am every day. It took me seven days, and now it’s an everyday thing to wake up early. At first, it was hard to wake up but now I love waking up early, I feel refreshed and more productive. One of the days I did accidentally sleep in, to be fair my alarm didn’t go off. I can tell you my whole day was off. I didn’t get a lot done and I felt super lazy. Not all days will go great because building a habit is hard, so some days will be more difficult than others.
When creating your habit make sure it can be flexible with your everyday life, and day to day activities. If you do something that doesn’t fit into your schedule it’s going to be very hard to do. Another tip that will help you is forgiving yourself when you mess up on a day. It’s ok to mess up, we are humans. If you miss more than one day it will be harder to get back on track.
I hope you can try these steps and build healthy habits to better yourself. Thank you for reading!