The Complete Guide to Creating a New Habit
“We first make our habits, then our habits make us. As the twig is bent, the tree inclines.” -Virgil
Whether we like it or not, every New Year is paired with the incessant question, “What’s your New Year’s resolution?”. This is often met with a sharp dose of shame from last year’s failure, some hope about this year’s resolution, or perhaps a total avoidance and rejection of the tradition. Either way, we’ve all failed at maintaining a healthy habit at some time or another. There’s a myriad of reasons most of us have difficulty with building new habits, but there are a few overarching reasons to consider:
- Making a new habit often goes against our evolutionary code, a human body and mind that would rather conserve energy than spend energy doing something new and not “necessary.”
- Many of us are seeped into a culture that continues to find ways to allure us with processed food, technology, drugs, social media, and the other countless dopamine inducing activities. We’ve become more likely to say “Why would I go to the gym and get groceries when I could watch Netflix and order Uber Eats?” This reinforces procrastination, immediate gratification, and distraction.
- With the expectation of immediate gratification, anything that requires delayed gratification can feel like FOREVER, causing a premature impatience. We would never expect to lose 10 pounds the first time we set foot in the gym.
- For a Western Culture that has so many luxuries, we’re ironically more stressed out. Someone that’s stressed intuitively doesn’t want to increase stress by adding a healthy habit that often initially creates stress to start and maintain.
For all these reasons and plenty others, we also have less excuses. With the advances in technology we have access to tools that promote habit forming such as: helpful apps, smart watches, audio books, online support groups, and faster access to pretty much anything that will be on our doorstep in two days with free shipping.
I think it’s safe to say that everyone could benefit from either knowing how to start a habit, or getting rid of an unhealthy one. Educating yourself on proper habit building can be the missing link to increasing your life expectancy, become more educated, or doubling your income.
The article breaks down four stages of working through starting and maintaining a new habit:
- Conscious contemplation.
- Taking inventory of the past and present.
- Finding your habit forming “tendency”.
- List of Habit “hacks”.
** I suggest writing down the answers, techniques, and general plan of action based on the guidelines below, we are much more likely to complete a goal if we write it down beforehand.
#1: Start with Conscious Contemplation
Identify the rough idea of a desired habit
Gather the general goals and possible habit/habits you’re considering.
(Throughout the article I will be using the common example of exercise/weight loss/healthy eating). I’d like to start some sort of exercise, lose some weight, and generally feel healthier.
Explore why you are doing it
There are plenty of “why’s” people may want to start a new habit, but not all of them are going to lead to consistent action. A good example of this is when we create habits in an effort to pacify a fear/pain rather than through positive/inspired action tied to personal values. Certain whys can jump start motivation to begin a habit, but that motivation can be fleeting. Whatever the reason you decide to start a new habit, make sure to revisit your “why” over time.
Right now, my motivation for working out is to lose weight for the boat party this summer. Eventually, I would like to see a positive change in my general self-love and care and to be a healthier human being for myself and loved ones.
#2: Take Inventory of the Past and Present
Explore your past experience with this habit.
Use your past experiences with starting a new habit to understand more about what made you successful.
In college I was able to keep a consistent workout routine and eat healthier when I had a workout buddy. I stopped when I moved to a new city.
Explore limiting emotional/mental hurdles
The problem with common advice on creating new habits is that it fails to integrate some of the childhood residue that could doom someone to fail before given a fair chance. For example, there could be a trauma around dieting, parents that never enforced discipline (or too much), or there’s an addiction/mental illness in the way. Spend some time reflecting on the ways in which your childhood or present mental challenges could impact the success of your new habit.
After some self-reflection, I realized food was used for self-soothing. When I was upset, my mom would immediately feed me cake, and never addressed my distress directly with empathy, understanding, and allowing.
Or maybe,
I was sexually abused as a child and have used my weight as a defense mechanism – so to lose
weight means to open myself up to a vulnerable position I never wanted to be in again.
Or perhaps,
I need to be mindful of my self-soothing and find new ways to manage my emotions. I also need to process my trauma while building this new habit.
Explore your current life circumstances, beliefs, and identity.
Take a step back and see how your current lifestyle and associated beliefs about yourself could positively or negatively impact the habit you’d like to form. This includes where you live, current support system, a limiting belief, or an aspect of your existing identity. Find ways to challenge, heal, or integrate these factors.
Because of my current job, I notice that I only have time in the morning to workout.
I also have always identified myself as a “night owl”.
Since high school, I have had a limiting belief that “I don’t deserve to be healthy and happy; that’s for “normal” people.”
#3: Find Your Habit Forming “Tendency.”
The work of Gretchen Rubin states that we generally fall into 1 of 4 behavioral tendencies. These tendencies can easily be applied to how we start and maintain a new habit. Read the descriptions below and see which one fits, or take this short quiz:
This will help in identifying which habit hacks fit your individual style.
- The Questioner
Resists outer expectations, meets inner expectations.
The questioner will meet an expectation if it makes sense to them, they will need to formulate habits mainly from inner expectations
As a Questioner, I need to do some research on diet/exercise that makes sense to me, and know that setting up external accountability/motivation will not necessarily be as large of a factor in maintaining a new habit.
- The Upholder
Meets outer expectations, meets inner expectations.
Upholders are free to choose either outer/inner expectations (or both) for forming their habits. They don’t want to let themselves OR others down.
As an Upholder, I need to set my own expectations for the new workout routine and integrate making a deal with my wife that I’ll do her laundry for a month if the habit doesn’t stick.
- The Obligor
Meets outer expectations, resists inner expectations.
Obligors have a difficult time acting from their inner expectations, so will need to set up external forms of accountability to maintain a new habit.
As an Obligor, I can ask my neighbor if she would be willing to set up a reoccurring time to meet at yoga and morning runs.
- The Rebel
Resists outer expectations, resists inner expectations.
Rebels tend to stick to a habit only if it’s an expression of their identity, or is something that’s the opposite of what others do – resisting being told what to do.
As a Rebel, I like to work out by chopping wood and working on my speed boat. I don’t set a schedule; I do these things when I feel like it.
#4: Select your Habit Hacks
There are A LOT of tips and tools on how to start and maintain a habit, I have selected 20 that I’ve seen work, are backed by research, and can be easily applied.
- Start small (do the first 2 minutes) – Yes, yes, a journey of 1,000 miles starts with one step – but the better question is what’s one step? We can still overestimate what a reasonable small step might be. Current advice says to start with just the first 2 minutes of a new habit. This may sound crazy, but it can be the momentum needed to get a habit formed before its enhanced. This can be difficult for people that want results NOW, but this is also about practicing the virtue of patience, Rome wasn’t built in a day (there’s your two cliché metaphors for the day).
Instead of trying to run 10 miles the first day of creating a new habit for running, I’ll focus on putting on my running shoes.
- Use temptation bundling – When you use temptation bundling, you take an existing desire (like watching TV) and commit to combining it with the new habit.
I will make a rule that if I want to binge watch Netflix, I have to spend the first 30 minutes on my exercise bike while watching.
- Future pace – In our busy lives we may have all the intent in the world to start the new habit, but our unconscious likes to go on autopilot. One way to ensure the habit gets into the unconscious (other than repetition) is to future pace. This is the mental exercise of rehearsing the habit step by step in your mind. See how this habit will fit into the day, imagine what it would look like and feel like to complete the habit.
The night before I start my new workout routine, I spend a couple minutes in bed imagining getting up and feeling excited to start the workout, I can see the time of day, how I’ll make a cup of coffee beforehand – all the way to the completion of the workout.
- Find the carrots and count them – Habits won’t stick without a dose of reinforcement. There’s a reason why video games are so addicting, the creators do I great job of programming consistent “wins”, whether it be collecting gems, beating a boss and “leveling up”, or finding a secret path – we can now imagine leveling up our real life character. Reinforcements could be in the form of tracking your progress with an app or feeling the joy of losing 1 pound. We may have larger goals in place for our habits but we can’t just pass up the small nuggets of positive reinforcement.
I will use a Fitbit, track my progress on a calendar, and embrace small milestones of progress by noticing a higher endurance.
- Accept and integrate the part that rebels – Imagine starting a new habit of journaling, to the little kid in you this feels like homework. As a kid, your parents told you to do your homework and you would often rebel and refuse. The part that rebelled just doesn’t go away overnight. That part of you may always be there to some extent – but denying and resisting its presence only makes it angry. Instead, let go of demonizing this part so you can begin to integrate its intentions and act in alignment with your adult self’s intentions.
As a kid, I hated going to soccer practice. My parents signed me up without my consent, so I often refused to get ready, or somehow sabotage my attendance. When I think of working out, this part likes to rebel and watch TV. I am mindful of this part, accept its presence, re-parent it, and get in touch with my adult self to get myself to workout.
6. Make room for freebies, but not loopholes – One of the most common ways I see people fail at maintaining their habits is something called the what-the-hell effect. It’s when we commit to a habit like trying to drink less alcohol, and something makes us break it (even if just once), we then say to ourselves “what-the-hell” and get unbelievably drunk.
Because of this one slip up, people will often give up on the habit, letting the one instance become the norm once again. It’s true we cannot have these moments build up, but we should not hold ourselves to a standard of perfection, either. Gretchen Rubin also talks about the many “loopholes” we create that justify why should be able to a break a habit. If we don’t catch the moments that loopholes get out of hand, and if we’re too strict on not having ANY freebies, we are more likely to fail.
So, we MUST have built in freebies, which give us permission ahead of time to break the habit, but also stay committed to our desired habit/goal.
I was consistent with my workout routine for 2 weeks until I visited my friend for a weekend. I know this is an exception, that I haven’t completely “failed”, I need to allow myself a freebie. I’m excited to get back in the gym this week!
- Don’t rely on willpower –We would like to believe that we have all the willpower in the world to control our behavior, but as you’ve probably noticed, we have a really hard time simply willing ourselves into new behaviors. Because of this thinking, we are more likely to be harsh on ourselves and give up when we fail to keep our new habit. Yes, there are moments that willpower will have to be a resource, but our goal is to rely on it as little as possible. There’s a concept called choice architecture, which is the structuring of our life around the choices we would like to make (and cease to make). This allows us to not deplete our willpower throughout the day, as it becomes more difficult to rely on willpower the more we have to use it throughout the day. Look for ways that a positive/negative habit is choosing you, by how your life is structured around it – then look for creative and convenient ways to rely on willpower less.
With my new lifestyle goals, I moved my desk at work to not be next to the snack table, made a more accessible and easy way to see the section of my closet for workout clothes, and switched gyms to the one across the street from my work.
- Think (and act) greater than how you feel– Let’s face it, you may not feel like going to the gym 5 times a week. Especially if you struggle with something like depression, there will be days that you’d rather get a root canal than leave the comfort of your warm bed in the middle of winter to get to the gym. Remember, your mind/body has been programmed by thousands of years of wanting to conserve energy. A hunter-gatherer would only want to “exercise” for a damn good reason (like chasing down its next meal). There are times that a feeling will motivate you, but you can’t always bank on it. The gift of evolution in this regard, is the ability to think greater than how you feel. This is not always easy, our feelings and body are the modalities of the almighty unconscious, but with practice, our thinking brain can override the feeling part of our brain to get us to act in accordance with our goals.
As I lay in bed, I don’t let the feeling of comfort overtake me by telling myself “1,2,3,4,5, Get up!” or “I know you’re comfortable, but you’ve committed to this”.
Perhaps I don’t even think about it, I just train myself to move when it’s time to go to the gym. Overtime, this will become a free flowing action from my subconscious mind.
- Use a commitment device – This can be anything that is used to lock in a habit ahead of time. For example, you’re trying to read more at night instead of watching TV. Before you get home, you’ve told your husband to hide the remote control until 10pm. A commitment device in this instance has held you accountable to the commitment you’ve made.
I’ve made a commitment to run with my friend every Tuesday at 6:30am, I will be more likely to go for a run knowing my friend is waiting for me.
- Take advantage of loss aversion – Us humans have a built-in aversion to loss. There are many studies that show people can get quite irrational when they know they will lose something that belongs to them. A common usage of this is giving money to a friend – and if you hit your goal you get the money back, if not, they donate it to a person, organization, or charity you despise. You can use the website StickK to try it out.
If I don’t hit my habit goals I will give my friend a gift card for a shopping spree.
- Develop a compassionate, but firm, inner coach– This technique is especially useful for those that struggle with an inner critic or a stubborn inner rebel. Having a part of you that’s encouraging, compassionate, and firm enough to keep you disciplined is the perfect counter to these types of self-sabotaging parts. It’s the voice of a parent that balances firmness with love — but you can imagine them as a coach.
As a kid, I didn’t have a responsible parent to wake me up and make sure I got to school on time. As an adult, I see that getting out of bed to get to the gym is what gets me most stuck. I have imagined what my inner coach would look like, sound like, and feel like to have enter the room and get me out of bed with their compassionate stance, yet firm tone.
12-20 in brief form…
- Write it down – people are much more likely to stick to a new habit if they write down their plan/intent/commitment.
- Use Mindfulness – Increase mindfulness exercises to increase conscious awareness of the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors involving the new habit.
- Be highly involved – but with low attachment – When you’re too attached to a certain outcome of a habit, you may be more likely to be disappointed and lose momentum. Instead, focus most your energy on your proactive involvement in the process.
- Choose the form of the habit/goal that invokes intrinsic motivation. We are much more likely to do something if it naturally provides us joy and excitement. These natural motivations are intrinsic, as opposed to motivation for extrinsic (external) rewards like money or acceptance. If your desired habit is to work out more, choose the form of exercise that will naturally be exciting and something you may actually like/want to do.
- Know your values – Motivation/discipline doesn’t exist without there being some attached personal value. Having a good idea of your values and your why for starting the habit in the first place can add an extra boost to action. In this way you can come from a place of inspired-value-based-action instead of fear or fleeting motivation.
- Suffocate the habits that get in the way – increase the number of steps or difficulty it takes to access your “bad” habits that get in the way of your new desired habits.
- Take advantage of a clean slate – take advantage of new beginnings and losses. If you move to a new house, think about how the new setting can be an advantageous opportunity to start the habit you’ve been putting off.
- Surround yourself with the right role models – It’s important to be around the type of people that model the type of habits you wish to obtain. This also works in reverse – we want to be mindful of how we are influenced to maintain the bad habits of the people we choose to be around.
- Access the right “part” with imagery or music – It’s helpful to understand that we are made of multiple parts. There is a part that loves TV, a part that cares for their pet, and a part that wants to better their lives. In order to access the part that would be most helpful, indicate what images or music that would conjure the part. Understanding these inner landscapes can make for a much smoother transition to then act on a desired habit.
Not all these tips and techniques work for everyone. What’s most important is to find what works for you and commit to the process, the more you repeat the habit, the more it will seep into your subconscious. If you’re still having difficulty, it might be time to up your research, find a coach/therapist, or change your approach. Remember, each day you have the opportunity to start or continue a positive habit. The habits you maintain will be an integral part in who you are becoming. The person you’re becoming will impact your future relationships, success, health, and overall wellbeing. Now get started.
