How to create healthy habits

Simple steps to help yourself create healthier habits.

“Janice” seemed anxious and distracted. Normally confident, she felt off-kilter having

given up chocolate for the New Year. The will to resist the delicious temptation was
weak and she was afraid she would to succumb to the desire to enjoy the sweet
morsels again. Janice is not alone.

Our lives are a collection of habits both good and bad that determine one’s success or
failure, happiness or sadness, or our state of health. Once clear that we want to live a
healthy and happy life, we can take a look at what habits we are keeping that are
harming our health or hindering our success. This is often the impetus for the course
corrections that involve letting go of bad habits and creating new ones that support our
desire for optimum health and happiness.

While this takes time and work to make behavioral changes for health and wholeness,
we can empower our effort by understanding the nuts and bolts of habits. Author
Charles Duhigg, in The Power of Habit, outlines the “habit loop” or framework for
understanding the formation of a habit. They are a cue(trigger) or reminder, routine,
and reward.

How can we stick to our decision to eat healthy, exercise, or learn to play the piano?
When we associate our reminder for our new habit with something we already habitually
do every day, like brushing your teeth, it will be more effective. Common knowledge
tells us to start small. Transformative changes, like Rome, were not built in a day. If
you want to start a flossing habit, Stanford psychologist BJ Fogg suggests, start literally
with one tooth. The reminder is brushing your teeth, which is the cue to floss. Brushing
is routine and the reward of that clean mouth feeling (not to mention a good dental
checkup), inspires you to repeat the habit loop until it becomes effortless.

These small successes build on themselves. In the beginning, create habits that are
easy to achieve. This will strengthen your habit making muscle and belief that you can
succeed in making positive changes in your life.

We can make choices that make us feel good. The use of rewards, inspire us to keep
taking the actions that will become the new habit. Celebrating small successes each
time by giving ourselves credit and praise, proves we can stretch and build on them in
creating bolder and more ambitious habits.

If we are trying to break a bad habit, start by increasing the resistance to doing it. We
like to do what’s easy, so make it more difficult by removing the temptation or making it
hard to do. Sometimes a change in environment will change the negative trigger or cue
that invokes the bad habit.

We can create healthy habits that feel good to do and that help us to be happy, by
following these three simple steps.

1. 1. Make your new healthy habits easy to engage in. Associate them with things you do
      every day already.
   2. Let that be your reminder to initiate practice of your new habit. Do this as a part of
      your daily routine.
   3. Reward yourself by acknowledging your success again. Kudos for another solid
      effort. REPEAT.

Soon you will have a new discipline that will serve as fuel for creating another habit that
is changing your life one day at a time.