Mental Tricks to Build Your Habits
Here are some tips based on my experience that will help you build good habits.
You may want to have a reading habit. You are scrolling around social media and found that Bill Gates read about 50 books a year, or roughly about one book per week. For that exact moment, you are having this kind of adrenaline-rush to “copy” his extreme reading habits. However, you already know that you didn’t finish any single books last year. Maybe you read articles online, but books aren’t your thing.
Like all of you predict, it won’t happen.
Why? Every action requires a certain amount of energy. The more power required, the less likely it is to occur.
The Principle of Least Effort
The principle was proposed by George Kingsley Zipf, an American professor of philology at Harvard University, in his book “Human Behaviour and the Principle of Least Effort.” He theorized that the distribution of word use was due to the tendency to communicate efficiently with the least effort. Hence, the principle of least action is also known as Zipf’s Law.
“People will naturally gravitate toward the option that requires the least amount of work”
— George Kingsley Zipf
If your goal is to read 50 books per year or one book per week, from the point that you don’t even finish any single piece, that’s hard. It is a habit that requires a lot of energy.
You are not entirely incorrect. Behavior change is hard and painful since It was a part of human nature.
“There’s been a lot of work done to help people change their behaviour. Up until now we really don’t have many successful interventions to help people maintain those changes over time”
How can you make your resolutions then? Is it impossible to build new good habits?
Of course not! Lucky for you, some tools can be used to trick our natural human behavior so that you can do anything you want.
Turning Big into Small
It is a concept of how you can break-down one activity. Why? to reduce the energy needed for doing one action. There are three ways of doing so:
1. Work on your predecessor activity
Habits lead you down on a path. Before you know it, you are speeding toward the next behavior. It seems to be easier to continue what you are already doing than start doing something different.
I will divide the activity into two: predecessor and follow-up activity.
The predecessor is the activities required before making your actual move. Before you want to drink a coffee, you should first going into the kitchen, boil the water, set up your cup, etc. It consists of several activities, becoming a series. While the follow-up activity is a possible activity after you are doing your predecessor activity.
It is not guaranteed that you will do your follow-up as you planned before. You might want to drink a cup of coffee, but on your way to the kitchen, you saw a jar of biscuit. You started eating it instead of drink a cup of coffee.
The habits you follow without thinking often determine the choices you make when considering. You check your phone thinking that “Oh, it’s okay, I will check my phone for 5 minutes”, Swosh! Time passed so fast, and soon you realize that you have spent 30 minutes scrolling around the Instagram timeline. You probably relate because I am.
Each morning there is a crucial moment around 7 a.m that shape my first session of the day (08.00–10.00 a.m). I usually already woke up at that time. I will either take a bath and then open my laptop. Or checking my phones for any updates (believe me, “checking updates” was just my excuse to my brain that it is okay for doing “nothing” just a bit). When I am doing so, “just-checking” turns into exploring it longer and sometimes turns into watching something else — Netflix.
The set of activities is connected with decisive moments — it set the options of your follow-up activities and the outcome. The decisive moments are caused by controllable (your desire) and the uncontrollable factor (power outage, broken laptop, etc.). You should only focus on the controllable factor. You couldn’t do anything with the uncontrollable one, right?
Even though there might be a case when the crucial follow-up activities are not resulting in the desired action, the chance of success is so much higher. It’s better than expecting the desired outcome with some random predecessor activity, like expecting to work on my to-do list but scrolling my Instagram timelines before.
Every time the clock hit 7 a.m. I try to force my body to take a cold shower. After 15 minutes, I will come up with a fresh mind and body, ready to devour all of my to-do lists.
Taking a bath is my crucial morning moment. I found that by trial and error. By doing so, I have a higher chance of doing my follow-up activity as I desired. Yes, sometimes taking a bath will not resulting in opening my laptop and working. But I promise you, those events do not occur often.
The key is focusing on your predecessor activity which will manipulate the brain of thinking, “the activity is not that hard. “ So, the higher probability of starting your desired action.
2. Lessen your target activity level
It is easy to start too big. Setting high goals excite us and inevitably takes over, end up trying to do too much too soon.
James Clear invented the two-minute rule.
“When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do”
Why? The idea is to make your habits easy to be repeated once you already did the first-time activity. In this case, our desired action should easy to start with to make it sustainable. Instead of creating a perfect habit from the start, do the easy things on a more consistent basis.
The two-minute rule is actually just an abstract parameter whose goals are to manipulate your brain’s perspective into measuring the difficulties in doing one activity. It doesn’t have to be a fixed two minutes. Any parameter work just fine as long as you comfortable with it.
- Duration — reading for 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, etc.
- Length — jogging for one-kilometer.
- Unique Units — reading for one subsection, jogging for one stadium laps.
Do you think reading for 10 minutes is a piece of cake? Go for it.
When I started building a habit to read in my senior high school year, It started with a one-page chunk of dividing my reading session. It may take 15 minutes, 20 minutes, or even just 5 minutes. That works for me until I realize that a one-page chunk will puzzle information digestion in the book’s content. The books often do not divide its section according to page. One subsection may take 2 pages long, or maybe longer.
I try to change my parameter from a one-page chunk into one subsection. It is actually a level-up version of the activity I do before because one subsection is usually taken longer than one-page.
Up until now, my reads reached one book per week, minimum. I believe the current level won’t be achieved if I rushed into thinking that I could read one book per week from none.
You might manage on your first try, but it’s useless if you can’t make the repetition of those acts.
Habits require repetition. The more you repeat the same activity, the more it will penetrate your unconscious mind. The energy needed to do your workout when you had done it 10 times will be smaller than when you first did it. You will automatically level up your parameter difficulties. Your brain started to think, “It’s not as hard as I thought before.”
3. Combining both
You may choose one of the two above, or you can also combine both. Work on the predecessor with a lessened follow-up activity level. Using this combination, you will get a higher chance of doing your desired activity plus make your activity sustainable.
There are many ways of building new good habits. I believe that there is no such magic formula that can solve all people’s problems. My experience might be different from yours. Keep working on trial and error. Only you can understand your own preference. Once you do, you will have your own formula for building new good habits effectively.
Make it easy to start; once it happens, make it sustainable.
