4 Powerful Concepts To Make Your Habits Stick

There are countless articles on Medium and online in general that offer tips/hacks on habits. In this article, I have curated the 4 most powerful concepts which changed my life in profound ways.

The majority of the people that I speak to that were unsuccessful in maintaining their habits have one thing in common — they exerted a lot of energy in the first few weeks, then they crashed and burned after a few months.

A lot of people that feel inspired to make a change in their life think that they have to go all-out at the start of their journey. For some reason, many people believe that they have to exert themselves because that is the key to transforming their behaviors. This is far from the truth.

If your goal is to make exercise a habit, for example, start with a 5-minute workout. Super easy right? You barely cracked a sweat. Now do it again tomorrow. Then the next day. Keep going. 7-days in a row! Now make the workouts 10 minutes. Repeat the same process. Week 3, up the time to 15 minutes. Keep repeating this process until you reach 30 minutes. Congratulations, you have now formed a habit.

People will read that and think it's over-simplified, that there’s no way that will stick, and 5-minutes will not do anything to change their fitness. From a physiological standpoint, yes, a 5-minute workout will not transform your body by much. But by consistently working out every single day, you are training your mind and your body to become a person who works out every day.

Over time, you can increase the difficulty or duration in small increments so it's not a shock to our system and you get used to successfully completing tasks. While at the same time, you are conditioning yourself to be able to do more or improve over time. You can apply this same concept to any habit or skill you want to develop.

Building on point one, how often you do a task and when you do it matters.

If you have a consistent time that you go to bed, have you ever noticed how you wake up at around the same time every morning without an alarm clock? Have you noticed how your body feels hungry around the same time if you eat meals at a specific time every day? It’s because of our frequent repetitions of those tasks at specific times.

As you repeat actions, your mind and body adapts. It starts to memorize sequences and patterns of actions. For example, if you practice a few chords on a guitar for 15 minutes, your body and your brain notices: “Hey you are repeating this sequence of actions, it must be important.”

If you pick up the guitar the next day and practice the same chords, you will notice that it’s easier to play those chords than on day one. When you practice enough times, you can recall those chords and play them effortlessly without watching a video tutorial or someone showing you. Your body and mind does this for any task that you do. It is an evolutionary trait that we use to learn new skills.

You can compound this effect by repeating the same task at the same time every day. If you practice playing guitar for 15 minutes every night at exactly 8 PM, your mind and body starts to memorize that 8 PM is guitar playing time. After enough repetitions, you will notice a strange sensation in your hands and desire to play guitar at 8 PM without even looking at the time.

You can program yourself to instinctively do things without thinking and with minimal effort or resistance. Simply through a high frequency of repetition and consistent timing every day.

Language is a paradox. In many ways, it has the power to liberate us. But with a few changes in words, language can imprison us.

If someone had the power to tell you what to do or how to think, we would call that slavery. Most of us are slaves to our negative self-talk. We show very little willpower when confronted by our negative thoughts or emotions. That is why it is important to develop our self-awareness, edit the language we use in our self-talk, and build a practice of interrupting those thoughts when they occur.

Is the task too big or too difficult? If you focus on how big a mountain is or how challenging the journey is, you would be less inclined to climb it. Can you break it into smaller parts first and take one small step at a time. Can you simplify the action steps? Can you ask for help?

Does the task have an imbalance of risk vs reward? Tasks that have a high risk or require a lot of effort but offer low rewards are naturally less appealing to you. If the reward is small, is there another way of looking at the reward that makes it seem larger? Are there other benefits of completing the task that you are not thinking of?

The more you resist doing a task, the more likely you are to avoid doing it. Subconsciously, you are developing a habit of not doing — a habit of avoidance. Actions or tasks that require less effort and higher rewards become more attractive in these situations. That is what procrastination is.

You can break this behavior by identifying when resistance shows up for you and practicing re-framing your perspective of the tasks that you need to do. Think about how you can make those tasks easier and think about how its’ rewards can be greater than you think they are. Making your desired habits look more attractive than procrastinating.

Every single great discovery or invention is a result of people collaborating with each other. Even the great scientists, artists, and musicians throughout history who worked largely in solitude have been influenced by other people’s work.

Humans are social beings. We tend to mimic the behavior of the tribe in order to fit in. If we didn’t fit in, we would be cast out from the tribe and that can be dangerous for us. This is another evolutionary trait that we have developed ever since our ancestors lived in small tribes and still exists in our natural instincts today.

It’s easier to develop a habit with a group of people than it is to do everything by yourself. You can share advice, keep each other motivated, and hold each other accountable. People who practice their habits with a group are more likely to be successful in maintaining their habits than people who practice by themselves.

With modern-day technologies, it's even easier to find your tribe. There are Facebook groups, Meetup.com, Reddit communities, or search for events online that are related to your habits. If you can’t find any groups that match what you are looking for, then you can start one. There’s a very good chance that someone else is looking for the same group.

It’s free to join and free to be a member. Members will be grouped with other members based on their time zones so you can meet other members, share challenges or successes, create accountability for writing, and write together.

I hope you find this post insightful and that it creates an impact on the way you develop your habits. I’d love to hear your thoughts or success stories in the comments section.

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