How to Change your Habits

To change your outcomes you need to change your habits.

If you look around, you’ll realize your life is full of little habits. The way you eat, work and sleep don’t change much from day to day.

Some of your habits are identical to other people but most of them are unique to you.

We form habits because we seek efficiency. Once we learn something works, we have no desire to change it. We need a major reason and incentive to change our habits.

For example, you may always use the electric kettle to boil water. But, what if the water boils faster in a pot? Have you tried it?

Just because we seek efficiency, it doesn’t mean we always get it. If you never try boiling water in a pot you’re going to assume an electric kettle is more efficient.

You see, when we get too caught up in our daily lives we don’t leave time for experimentation.

How are we going to get better outcomes If we keep doing the same old methods?

If you never try to wake up early for a week, you’re always going to think you’re a night person.

Or if you never try a vegan or vegetarian diet, you’d think you’ll die without eating meat.

There’s a pattern in the way we live our lives and our habits have a lot to do with the outcomes we achieve.

Good habits will yield good results and bad habits will yield bad results. It’s super obvious yet we keep our bad habits. But why?

You don’t need other people to tell you what a bad habit is. If you smoke cigarettes, eat unhealthy food and never exercise, you’ve got some bad habits. Period.

You just have to be brutally honest with yourself and take a hard look at your habits, especially the daily ones.

To change your habits, you need to increase your self-awareness. You have to know yourself better than anyone else.

Whenever you’re not seeing the results you dream of, it’s time to analyze your habits. List them, evaluate them and make a plan to change them.

You don’t need to start a revolution. Do it one at a time. Never try to change more than one habit at once. Start with the easiest one and work your way up.

When you change one small habit, you feel the difference it makes in your life. It will then motivate you to focus on the rest of them.

But if there’s one bad habit that you must change right away is the habit of multitasking. You will not be able to perform any one task well until you stop doing many tasks at once.

You need to be hyper-focus on one important task at a time. Get rid of your habit of context switching and your productivity will improve immediately.

There’s no argue that it’s not easy to change your habits. But when was the last time that it was easy to achieve something worth keeping?

I hope this has inspired you to learn about your bad habits and make a plan for changing them with better habits. I encourage you to not give up and remember that you’re always stronger than you think you are.

I wrote this piece as part of a 90-day challenge I took on to get better at this type of writing. To learn more about me you can visit my website here.