Habit Formation

Today, we are talking all about habit formation. What is a habit? How do I get rid of a bad habit? How do I start and implement a healthy habit?

As you know, all of this month, we’re talking about how to set goals, how to set yourself up for success this year. How you can have your best year yet.

A lot of what we will do over the course of the next year comes down to our habits because goals are the outcome that we’re striving for, but the habits are the systems that are going to get us to our desired in state. Let’s dive into this concept of what exactly a habit is and how you establish a good habit or break a bad habit. If you can get these core concepts down, it is absolutely going to transform your year and your life!

Live Goal Setting Training

Before we dive into talking about habits. I just want to remind you one more time. That we are going live in the MilSpouse Mastermind Facebook group today, January 24th at 8:00 PM EST to talk about YOUR BEST YEAR YET. We’re going to go through my entire annual planning process together – the 10 steps that I go through each year to set my intentions for the year. A

It doesn’t matter if you set goals by January 1st or not. This training is for you if you just don’t love the way your life looks today. If you’re struggling in any particular area. If you think it’s too late to set goals for the year. If you’re not sure how to actually keep and set a goal for this year, because you have so many unknowns on your plate. Maybe you know that you’re moving. or you at least have a good indication that you’re probably moving, but you haven’t heard any information on that yet. Welcome to my life! Wherever you find yourself, if you are not where you want to be today, then we need to talk about how we actually set goals for our life as a military spouse. Yes, even when there are so many circumstances outside of our control.

If you can be there live, I will have a free 30-page workbook with questions that will take you through each of these 10 steps and set you up for success in 2022. So make plans to be there.

If you’re not already a part of the Facebook group, go to milspousemastermind.com/community. And that will take you directly to the group so you can get plugged in and be there to talk about how we set ourselves up for our best year yet.

What is a Habit?

As we are rounding out the month of January and how we are setting ourselves up for success this year, I felt like one of the things we have not done yet is talking about habit formation.

[00:04:22] What in the world is a habit? A habit, at the foundational level, is simply a routine behavior that is performed regularly. And, in many cases, a habit is something we do automatically. We do without intentional thought, we just get used to doing something. We’re constantly performing habits, even when we don’t realize it.

[00:04:49] One of the beautiful things about how we were designed as human beings is that our brains create these mental shortcuts. They learn from our experiences. It reduces our cognitive load and frees up our mental capacity. So we don’t actually have to think about what we’re doing most of the time. You don’t think about the fact that you’re actually breathing. But if you were to stop breathing, you would not be able to stay alive.

[00:05:22] Breathing becomes a habit so that you can focus your attention on other things. The ultimate purpose of a habit is to solve our problems of life with as a little energy and effort as possible.

Now, two of the best books that I have read about habit formation are number one, Atomic Habits by James Clear. And if you were just choosing one book that you want to read about habits, that is definitely the book I would recommend..

I have also read The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. Duhigg goes a lot more into the science of habit formation. So if you geek out on those things, I think you would really enjoy that read as well. But just a general guideline of how does habit formation work, and what are some practical strategies to start implementing healthy habits and get rid of bad habits. Atomic Habits is what I would recommend.

4 Building Blocks of Habit Formation

[00:06:25]. So let’s briefly talk about the science of habit formation. Habits can be broken down into four simple steps. A cue, craving, risk, and reward.

The cue is the thing that triggers your brain to initiate a behavior. It might be a scent that you smell or something that you see or something that you hear. This is the cue that triggers the behavior.

The craving is the motivational force behind every habit – our thoughts and feelings and emotions are. This is what transforms the cue into the craving. We hear something, it triggers us to want something. What we are wanting, what we are feeling, that’s our craving.

[00:07:33] And then the response is the actual habit you perform, which can be a thought or it can be an action. It’s what we do when we experience a craving. And then the fourth part of this is the reward. That’s the goal of every habit, maybe something satisfying. What we do in response to the craving, the action that we take, or the thought that we think, delivers us a result, a reward.

[00:08:08] So, for example, there is a cue. I smell the coffee brewing in the morning, and I have a craving for a cup of coffee. So the action or the habit I perform is to go over and pour myself a cup of coffee. The reward is that I am drinking the cup of coffee and it tastes amazing. Cue, craving, response, reward.

Habit formation is important because habits can lead us to changing our lives for the better or for the worse. In the book, Atomic Habits, James Clear writes that you can choose to improve some area of your life by 1% every day. And improving something by 1% doesn’t seem that significant. It’s just a 1% change. But if you were to improve things by 1%, every day for an entire year, you would be 37 times as effective at that thing. Or 37 times better at that thing.

[00:09:24] Small changes in our daily habits can lead us to very different results. They can help us fulfill our potential. They can help us become who we’re meant to be.

The info we’re about to go over together is based on the book Atomic Habits. Clear breaks everything about forming a healthy habit into four basic keys or secrets to make healthy habits stick.

Make Healthy Habits Obvious

[00:09:59] They  are number one to make it obvious. If we want to create a good habit, we need to make it obvious. Now, one way we can do this is to put a plan in place that says, when this happens, I will do X. So we’re making a plan for what we will experience. What am I going to do when I wake up? I am going to turn off my alarm and get out of bed, instead of hitting the snooze button.

[00:10:33] So what is the behavior that you want to create? We need a plan. Another way we can do this and really make this simple is by using habit stacking. And that is simply noticing an existing habit that we have, and adding the habit that we want to enact to that existing habit.

So for example, when I brushed my teeth, I will also wash my face. Or after I brush my teeth, then I will wash my face. Or when I pour myself that cup of coffee in the morning, because I know that I am going to drink coffee in the morning, I’m going to add a scoop of collagen powder to my coffee, or I’m going to take my vitamins. I am adding that new habit that I want to implement to an existing habit that already is a part of my everyday life. The first step is to make the habit obvious.

Make Healthy Habits Attractive

The second step to healthy habit formation is to make it attractive. Pair something you want to do with something you need to do, or you have to do. Another way to put this is to make it more fun. So let’s say I need to fold laundry. I’m pairing that with something I want to do, which is to listen to a podcast or an audio book.

I’m pairing these things together, and then I am also learning something and having fun while I’m doing something that needs to get done. So we want to make habit attract. Another way to make a habit attractive is by joining a group, a community of people who are already doing that thing that you’re trying to do, that normalizes the behavior.

[00:12:34] If you want to get healthier, put yourself in a situation where you are around healthy people. This is why sometimes it’s easier to go to the gym than work out at home, because you’re putting yourself in a situation where everyone around you is also working to get healthier.

Make Healthy Habits Easy

A third step to healthy habit formation is to make it easy, decrease the number of steps between you and the habit you want to implement. Make getting started easy. A great example of this is the two-minute rule. If we are after lasting habit change, not just a short-term fix, but a long-term sustainable way of living, then we have to start really small and make it easy.

The two-minute rule says to choose to do a habit that takes no more than two minutes. In my own life, I’m really trying to get better about washing my face at night. It has been something that I have struggled with for years. I know it’s good for my face, but I still am lazy about it. And so the good news is that it takes me no more than two minutes to actually wash my face at night.

[00:13:59] And so I’m pairing that with habit stacking and the two-minute rule to make the formation of that habit easier for me to do. I’m making it easy. Following the two-minute rule also looks like, Hey, I’m not going to start by working out for an hour. What can I do in two minutes that moves me closer towards that healthy lifestyle I crave?

[00:14:23] Maybe I start by saying I’m going to get out my workout clothes every morning, or at night before I go to bed. That’s something that takes me no more than two minutes to do. And then I start adding on to that. Okay, I’m going to put on the workout clothes that I get out, and then I’m going to start making myself drive to the gym.

[00:14:45] And then I’m going to drive to the gym and work out for at least five minutes. We build onto those habits. And when we do that, we’re actually making a sustainable life change. We’re building habits that will serve us for the rest of our life, rather than making a short-term quick fix.

[00:15:06] It can feel, if you follow the two-minute rule, that you’re not making significant progress. But what we’re ultimately looking at is what our long-term goal is.

Make Healthy Habits Satisfying

Now we’ve talked about how to make healthy habit formation obvious. We make it attractive. We make it easy. And the fourth key is to make it satisfying.

[00:15:33] We need to give ourselves a reward for completing that habit. We need to make it enjoyable and satisfying. What will you do to reward yourself for that healthy habit? Because the more we build that reward, the more we will want to continue the behavior. And the more that it will become a part of our behavior, the more that it will become an automatic part of how we function. The more it will become a part of who we are.

How to Break a Bad Habit

[00:16:07] There’s a lot more that I could say about forming healthy habits, but I just want to very quickly go over the opposite. Let’s say that you have a bad habit pattern and you want to break that bad habit. So we’re going to do basically the complete opposite to break a bad habit.

So number one, instead of making it obvious, we want to make it invisible. We want to remove the cues from our environment. Out of sight, out of mind. We’re making it where we don’t have those unhealthy cues in our life. The second thing is to make it unattractive. So if it’s a habit we want to develop, we want to make it attractive. If it’s a habit we want to break, we make it unattractive. We want to focus on the benefits of avoiding those bad habits.

The third thing is that we want to make it difficult. If we want a good habit, we make it easy. If we want to break a bad habit, we make it difficult to do. We increase the number of hoops we have to jump through to be able to do that bad habit.

[00:17:29] So if I find myself addicted to my phone, then I’m going to go set my phone across the room or put it in another room, So I’m not tempted to pick it up 50 gazillion times a day. We want to make it difficult to do a bad habit.

And then the fourth step to that is to make it unsatisfying. There’s a negative result to us doing that bad habit. And really one of the best things you can do, if you want to break a bad habit, is to find an accountability partner. And to say, hey, if I do this bad habit thing, there’s a negative consequence to my actions.

So let’s very quickly recap the four keys together. If we want to create a good habit, we’re going to make that habit obvious. We’re going to make it attractive. We’re going to make it easy to do. And we’re going to make it satisfying. We’re going to give ourselves a reward for the good behavior. And conversely, if we want to break a bad habit, we’re going to make doing the bad habit hard. We are going to make it invisible. We’re going to make it unattractive. We’re going to make it difficult to do. And we’re going to take active steps to make it unsatisfying, to have a consequence for the behavior.

Healthy Habit Formation & Goal Setting For Military Spouses

I hope that this gave you a starting point. Like I said, we could spend a lot more time on the details of habit formation and how goal setting and habit formation tie together and ultimately tie back to our identity, our values, who we want to be, and how we want to show up. How all of these pieces of the puzzle really fit together. But what I want you to walk away with today is four secrets to making habits stick.

Think of one habit that you want to implement in your own life. Ask yourself how you can make it a habit. How can you make it more obvious, attractive, easy to do and satisfying? If you will take the time just to think through these four keys and how you can build habits around these things, then you will experience far more success in the long run.

Now, as I said, I would love for you to join us at our free training in the Facebook group tonight. There are so many of us that have a lot of life going on. We have circumstances outside of our control, and sometimes it can keep us from setting goals or derail us from pursuing the goals that we’ve already set. And we start to experience a lot of self-doubt and a lot of questioning.

[00:20:38] Is there something wrong with me that I’m not pursuing my goals? Do I just not have the motivation and the willpower I need? What I really want to do is to show you how it’s possible, and show you the plan that I have been using for the last few years to really set my intentions for the year. And to make progress in the year as a whole, even when it’s a year of chaos and change and PCSing and deployments and new babies and new homes and everything that happens. We can still set and pursue goals, and move closer to chasing our dreams, and to who we’re meant to be. We don’t have to wait for tomorrow, for some future season to actually make progress and live a life with purpose.