Category: mini habits

bad habits, behavior change, creating habits, good habits, habit, habit change, habit formation, habit loop, how to break a bad habit, Interrupt a bad habit, mini habits, weight loss

WHY HABITS ARE SO IMPORTANT

“You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.” John C. Maxwell

Habits hold the key to achieving a strong, lean body full of energy and vitality. It is our daily routines that make us who we are. According to the latest research, we spend half of our lives performing habits, but very few people understand them. My goal is to help you better understand the power of habits and why they exist.

There are two characteristics of good habits that make them invaluable. First, we perform them repeatedly, which means their benefits will cumulate. Second, they are reflexive. They don’t require motivation or willpower to do. We don’t think about habits. If you are like me, you can recall doing something out of habit that made no sense at all, like reaching for your phone when it’s dead.  Once we establish a habit, we respond to a contextual cue. It is part of the reason we don’t pay much attention to them.

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Action Changes Things
action triggers, atomic habits, bad habits, BDNF, behavior change, creating habits, good habits, habit, habit change, mini habits, small wins, tiny habits

MY CORE BELIEFS

I want to share some of my core beliefs. My goal is to prove each one and provide practical strategies for developing healthy habits. I do not pretend to be the originator of these ideas. The truth is old. The more I study a topic, the more often I see the same concepts repeated.

While we are on the subject of beliefs and repetition, I hope you believe, as I do that, repetition is the mother of mastery. It is through frequent repetition that we develop a skill or expertise. Just because you have heard something once, that is no sign you got it.  I am going to repeat a handful of key concepts throughout this book. I want to engrain these concepts into your psyche – like a brain tattoo. I want to become that voice inside your head, helping you avoid all the traps in your way. I want you to read this book once and become an expert at engineering your habits. Continue reading MY CORE BELIEFS

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BDNF, decision fatigue, developing willpower, mini habits, SELF-ESTEEM, willpower

MINI HABITS HAVE A LOW WILLPOWER COST

Mini habits recognize that any new habit is going to take time to develop. We must get our reps in. After we have established a solid foundation, we can build on it. We are often told that we should never try to develop more than one habit at a time. This is great advice. The biggest mistake we can make about our willpower is placing too many simultaneous demands on it. The mental reserve we draw from to exert willpower is severely limited. Fortunately, with mini habits, this singular focus is unnecessary. 

Most of us want to develop multiple new habits. It takes a lot of self-control to focus on just one and ignore the others. The low willpower cost of mini habits means you can build multiple habits at once. They are so small we can create three or four at a time. As we follow through on our mini self-commitments, it will build our willpower and self-esteem.   

Habits not only build our willpower, but they also conserve it. Habits flow, unfettered by conscious thought. We aren’t struggling with a decision. We are reacting to a cue. Habits and environmental design are long-term strategies for conserving willpower. They allow us to avoid making a decision that would erode our willpower through decision fatigue. Instead of making a decision, we encounter a cue and execute a routine.  Continue reading MINI HABITS HAVE A LOW WILLPOWER COST

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end procrastination, good habits, habit, kill procrastination, mini habits, procrastination, stop procrastination, subjective fatigue, the spotlight effect, tiny habits

MINI HABITS REDUCE OUR NATURAL RESISTANCE TO CHANGE

Have you ever procrastinated starting a project because you felt overwhelmed? If you have, you’ve been the victim of subjective fatigue. Beginning a task carries the full weight of the commitment. Our mind looks ahead and calculates the work, which causes us to feel exhausted before we can start. What we think is laziness is often exhaustion. Mini habits are so silly small that they are nearly weightless. Mini habits kill procrastination. They carry almost no subjective fatigue. 

Another cognitive bias that acts as an obstacle to starting is called the spotlight effect. Whenever we step outside our comfort zone, our mind magnifies the difficulty of the task. Like subjective fatigue, it causes us to feel overwhelmed. Mini habits don’t raise any cognitive red flags because they are so easy to do. Mini habits circumnavigate these mental roadblocks to starting. Once we begin, we can base our decision to continue on the task’s actual difficulty – not a distorted version of it. As we develop the habit, our perceived difficulty will diminish, not because it has gotten easier, but because we have gotten better. Continue reading MINI HABITS REDUCE OUR NATURAL RESISTANCE TO CHANGE

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atomic habits, habit, habit change, mini habits, subjective fatigue, The Fat Loss Habit, The Power of Habit, tiny habits

The Magic of Mini Habits

Mini habits are designed to be ridiculously easy. Its creator recognizes that Newton’s First Law applies to psychology as much as it does to physics. Newton’s First Law, sometimes referred to as the Law of Inertia states, an object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an external force. We resist new behaviors the way an object resists a change in state. Our existing routines flow, they have momentum on their side. The biggest disadvantage that a new habit has it that inertia is working against it. Fortunately, mini habits are so easy to do that they don’t require much energy to overcome inertia. The willpower cost of mini habits is almost non-existent. A mini habit is the smallest of nudges – but that slight shove is all that is needed to put Newton’s First Law in our corner. Momentum becomes our ally instead of our enemy. We go from unstartable to unstoppable.  

Mini habits are so small that our mind doesn’t put up any resistance to starting. Once in motion, we can do as much or as little as we want. Since the behavior is something we are motivated to develop, chances are we’ll want to do more than the minimum. Mini habits are unambitious by design. Ambition, like perfectionism, is the enemy of progress. When we are too ambitious, we’ll often do nothing – like the person afraid to make a mistake. We will convince ourselves that if we cannot do everything, we won’t do anything. We will pick back up tomorrow. We always think tomorrow we will have more time, willpower, and motivation.  Good is not the enemy. Inaction is.  Continue reading The Magic of Mini Habits

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