How to Create New Habits – A Beginners Guide

“Learning how to create new habits and nurturing them on a daily basis is the key to make real progress in all aspects of your life such as health, family, relationships, finances etc.”

When we look at the most successful people in the world and how much they have achieved, it may seem like they are just so smart or born with the drive to be achieving things at the pace they are. But If you look closely, you will see that they are just people like us. What sets them apart is that they have created and nurtured habits into their life. Doing all the right things on a daily basis is what took them where they are today.

Learning how to create new habits and nurturing them on a daily basis is the key to make real progress in all aspects of your life such as health, family, relationships, finances etc.

Can you create new habits?

In most cases, making a habit out of something that is good for you is so much harder than it is to make a habit out of something that’s bad for you. For instance, it doesn’t take a lot to start smoking or drinking and make a habit out of it. That’s because these things are enjoyable and so easy to do. But we all know that it’s not good for us, while going for that daily morning run or meditation seems like a lot of work.

One of the most important things when you try to create new habits, is to understand and see why it’s important for you and remind yourself of all the benefits you are gaining by doing this activity on a daily basis. The human mind is wired in such a way that it performs better when we know there is something to gain by doing an activity. I guess what I am trying to say is, just because someone else is doing something, if you don’t see what you can gain out of it, chances are you will have a really hard time making a habit out of it.

However, once you understand the value and why you should create a new habit, and if you start with the correct strategies as explained below, there is nothing stopping you from creating and nurturing some great habits that will shape your life and carry you towards your goals in life.

How habits form

According to experts, a habit is formed when a new behaviour becomes an automatic process that can be done with little conscious awareness. By repeating the new behaviour regularly, it becomes engraved into our neural pathways.

Think about the certain activities you do daily without much effort like brushing your teeth, checking social media, taking a shower etc. Does it take much conscious effort to make it happen? Any habit good or bad, is formed in the same way and it is up to us to decide what behaviours we are going create new habits out of.

The 2012 book “In the Power of Habits” by Charles Duhigg, he explains how researchers at MIT discovered a three-step neurological pattern that shows how a habit is formed. The first step is cue which is the trigger that kicks off the habitual behaviour. The second step is the routine which is the step where the behaviour or activity is done. The last is the reward, which determines if a particular habit is worth creating.

6 Tips to help you create New Habits

Make a Decision

This is one the most important thing that will decide if your new habit goals are going to succeed. Your habits should be aligned to your life goals. Otherwise you’re going to have a really hard time convincing yourself to keep up when things get hard.

If you want to successfully create and stick to new habits, you will have to choose things that will help you become the best version of yourself.

Start small

When you are trying to achieve something new, it’s always a good idea to target for something that is achievable and realistic. For instance, let’s say you wanted to start meditating and set a goal of meditating for 20 minutes every day. Now, 20 minutes might not be a lot, but it’s a lot of time to just sit down with your thoughts when you are a beginner.

Instead, commit to starting with 5 minutes or even less but make sure that you do daily. When you know it’s just 5 minutes, you are more likely to do it in the beginning. You can always increase the time when you start getting more comfortable.

Be specific

When trying to make a new behaviour into a habit, it is very important to set a goal that is specific. How you define your goals really matters when it comes to creating new habits.

An example would be to set a goal like “I will meditate for 5 minutes every day” instead of “I will meditate regularly”.

Visualize your new habit

Visualization is one of the most powerful things you can do if you want to achieve something. While trying to create new habits, visualize yourself in a situation where you already had created the new habit. See how your life is when this habit is already part of your routine.

The more you visualize yourself in the ideal scenario of dong all the things you want to do, the more your subconscious mind accepts this behaviour and helps it become automatic.

Foster Flexibility

By now you already know that we are more likely to stick to a habit if it’s easy. When starting a new habit, we often tend to have fixed times of the day or certain rules around when and how something should be done. This is all good as it will help your subconscious mind to accept it as an automatic behaviour.

However, you should also cut yourself some slack when things don’t go as per your original schedule. Let’s be real, there will be days where things don’t go as per your schedule. If you’re too fixated on doing things only certain ways, you are more likely to pass it than actually do it. And creating new habits is all about repetition. So, by having a more flexible approach to creating new habits, you actually ensure you are still making it happen on days that did not go as per your schedule.

Practice patience and pace it smartly

Patience is without a doubt one of the most important skills no matter what you are trying to achieve. Remember, slow and steady growth always wins against rapid inconsistent gains. You will be surprised how much progress can be achieved if you are consistent and patient.

In order to successfully create and sustain a new habit, it needs to be easy in the beginning. It’s a good idea to stay consistent and make small increments gradually. Remember, slow and steady wins the race in the long run.

Experts say, Habitual behaviours make up a big chunk of our lives. This means you spend a big part of your life doing activities on auto-pilot. Hence, if you want to take control of your life and create your own destiny, you need to create habits that align with your goals and sustain them.