What Your Tiktok Feed Can Teach You About Making New Year’s Habits
The New Year has arrived, and with it, you’re filled with excitement, energy, and enthusiasm to tackle your resolutions, effect positive changes, and become the best version of yourself! This will be your year! 😁😁
Ok. That's probably what you sound like at the beginning of every new year.
But then a few weeks, or months down the road, you find yourself in the same old pattern from last year.
What happened?
The thing is, starting new resolutions and goals is great.
But many of us forget about a key ingredient when making resolutions:
How to be consistent.
When we form new goals we need to figure out two important things.
- How we plan to get started on them
- How we are going to get hooked(or, how we are going to develop consistency in working on these habits)
Thankfully, there is a proven strategy that can guide us in the right direction and surprisingly it has to do with TikTok.
Enter… Micro habits
If you are a TikTok user or any other social media user, have you noticed how you almost have never let a day go by without using the platform?
No matter how busy you are, I can assure you that you likely will find some time to scroll through those funny videos even if it’s just for a few minutes.
For some, it's even like this.
Yes, using TikTok, for many, is a habit, but it got that way first by becoming a micro habit.
Micro habit? Yes.
A micro habit(can also be called micro action) is a small, bite-sized version of a habit
Social media is engineered to make you first develop micro habits.
It's so easy to get started on a social media app and just as easy to get hooked no matter how long you use the app.
First, you scroll just for a few minutes, and next, you know an hour has gone by.
Let's consider two common goals and how micro habits can make a difference.
Exercise
Exercise more.
That’s a common, and important, New Year goal for many.
But people tend to set unrealistic goals, like saying they will exercise for an hour a day.
But is that really realistic? Will you have the time?
A better goal to start might be to exercise for 10- 15 minutes each. Why?
Because almost every human being on planet Earth can find or free up 10 minutes somewhere in the day.
And for a person who may be just starting to exercise, knowing that they only have to exercise for a short period can give them the motivation needed to overcome inertia(which in this case is the force that works against us.. like that sofa that's calling your name each time you think of exercising)
When we find ourselves able to make this habit stick through micro habits, the sky is the limit.
Micro habits and learning new skills
With the new year, you might set out to learn a new skill, like playing an instrument.
But with a busy life, it can be hard to make this happen.
Here is where micro habits come to the rescue again with the following two steps for playing an instrument.
- Find out the smallest time needed to practice the instrument. 10 minutes? 20 minutes?
2. Block that time out somewhere in the day that you are most likely to do it. Then when that time comes do it.
The small amount of time you devote makes it easy to fit into your daily life.
Then, once you establish a consistent pattern of reaching those micro goals(a.k.a being hooked ) you become motivated to reach even bigger goals.
Wow. That was a lot. But the main point of what I'm saying is this.
This year if you want to reach those big goals or start those new habits remember to start micro.
Micro habits and actions will help you overcome the difficulty of getting started on something new and help you get hooked or locked into the pattern of doing it.
Never forget that slow and steady does indeed win the race.
The race to become the person you want to be.
