Tag: mini habits

behavior change, creating habits, gateway habit, habit, habit change, mini habits, tiny habits

THE MOTIVATION FALLACY

The belief that you need motivation to take action is going to prevent you from forming any good habits. Motivation isn’t an effective strategy for long-term behavior change for two reasons. First, motivation fluctuates from day to day, and second, it tends to decrease over time. Habits not only fly under the radar of our consciousness, but they also fly under the radar of our emotions. Just like we savor the first bite of our meal more than the last, we tend to be less motivated the more times we repeat a routine. Boredom is the biggest obstacle to excellence. Many people hit the gym for two or three weeks, then lose their motivation to go and quit. They blame their lack of motivation, but it’s the idea that they need to be motivated to go that is the problem. So, if motivation isn’t the solution, what is? Learn more,,, Continue reading THE MOTIVATION FALLACY

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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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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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Action Changes Things
atomic habits, BDNF, mini habits, subjective fatigue, The Fat Loss Habit, The Power of Habit, The Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard,, tiny habits

Accomplish More with Mini Habits

If you read for five minutes each day, you would read approximately ten books a year. That is more than double the median number of the books the average American read last year. That is ten more books than the 27% of Americans who admitted to not reading a single book in the past year.[i] Assuming you were never motivated to read more than five minutes each day, in ten years, you would still have read 100 books and amassed a small library. Every time you looked at your library, you could take pride in the knowledge that you have read all the books in it – and all it took was a five-minute a day commitment.  Continue reading Accomplish More with Mini Habits

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