How to Develop Good Habits and Break Bad Habits? The 4 Rules to Develop Good Habits with EASE.

How to Develop Good Habits with EASE

How to develop Good Habits that will change your life.

Imagine if I told you that within the next few weeks, you could effortlessly incorporate life-changing habits into your daily routine. Sounds like a dream?

 Stick around, because I'm about to give you four important rules to master the art of Habit Development.

Rule 1: Don’t Rely on Self Control instead Change the environment.

My favourite sentence is “Chai ke saath Ladoo”.

Ohh! It was.

I am a sweet lover. Especially the Rasgullas and the laddos. My mouth waters every time I see them.

But you know what, thanks to two to three cups of tea and the ladoos everyday, my stomach started bulging out.

And my wife was not happy with it.

If you are married, you would know. It is impossible to live in a house with an Angry Wife, especially if the cause of the anger is your bulging stomach.

I decided to cut down on eating sweets.

Only to find out, “Self-control is much harder in practice than in theory”.

If I had sweets in the refrigerator, I ended up eating them.    

The only way to stop the habit is “Not bringing sweets home”.

Self-Control is a short-term strategy, not a long term.

Don’t rely on Self Control,

Instead, the First Step should be to change the Environment, Make the Environment

favorable or adverse for the habit.

Rule 2: Make it Attractive

I have a habit of reading books.

To write this article, I deep-dived into my mind to find what helped me cultivate the habit of reading books.

To Develop Good Habits, we need to make them attractive and to break bad habits, we need to make them unattractive.

It was 2015. I was in Kolkata with my family. We were in the market shopping for all sorts of things. And then my eyes fell on a small bookstore. Lots of books were kept outside on the table as a display. My eyes fell upon a book with a very attractive title. “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill. That day I bought my first self-help book.

Since then I developed the habit of reading books that helped me grow. For me, it happened unconsciously.

But how did it happen? Does it have any Science that can be repeated to form new habits?

Yes.

I have repeatedly heard that “CEOs of big companies read a lot of books”.

I have seen many videos where billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, advise on reading.

The thought that if “I read books I will become like the CEOs and the Billionaires one day” made the idea of reading books very attractive.

Rule 2 to develop good habits is to make them attractive, alternatively, if you want to break a bad habit make it unattractive.

Rule 3: Make it Easy

I was struggling with my life. I had no idea how to take my life to the next level. I didn’t want to get stuck at the level I was. For the last two years, I tried different things but none of them had succeeded. I had to find a solution.

 I decided to read one book every week to find out the solution.

Yes, reading books was very attractive to me. But initially, I was not very regular, and reading a book a week would have been impossible. How do I develop the habit?

I decided to do two things.

1.      Wake up early.

2.      Read for one hour every day.

But it was a tough task, I had to make it easy.

How did I make waking up easy?  

I started going to bed early and made sure I had enough sleep. This made waking up early easy.

Also, I started keeping my smartphone (where I used to set the alarm) far away from the bed. This made snoozing and going back to sleep hard (Though sometimes I snoozed and went back to sleep).

How did I make reading one hour a day easy?

I started with cleaning and arranging my study room the previous night. I would make sure the study table is clean and the book I want to read is on the table.

 After waking up entering into a clean, arranged, no mess room and picking up the book on the table and starting to read it became very easy.

Initially, I made sure I read for a few minutes every single day, and then slowly I kept on increasing the time.  

I am pleased to tell you,

In the past 4 months I have read 13 books have written 12 Blog Articles, made 12 YouTube Videos, and have resumed posting on Instagram and LinkedIn.

Rule No. 3 to Develop good habits is to make it easy and if you want to break any bad habit make it hard.

Rule 4: Make it satisfying.

Have you ever wondered why it is so easy to develop the habit of brushing your teeth every morning?

After brushing our teeth, the freshness that fills our mouth is amazing. Isn’t it?

Because of this satisfying result, brushing easily becomes a habit.

The most important Rule to develop a habit is to ‘Make It Satisfying’.

All bad habits are satisfying. Smoking and Drinking satisfy our brain. Eating Junk food satisfies our craving.

The Problem is good habits are not as satisfying as bad habits. How to make a good habit satisfying?

By using a  Habit Tracker.

How did I use a Habit Tracker to make my reading habit satisfying?

 I picked up a sheet of paper and wrote from 1 to 100 with checkboxes beside each number. I stuck it to the wall beside my study table. Every day after reading I used to tick one number starting from one and moving toward 100. The ticks represented that I had accomplished my task of reading for the day.

Every time I ticked a checkbox, it was such a good feeling. I felt accomplished. I felt good that I had made some progress and learned something new.

The feeling of accomplishment and progress made the activity satisfying.

The number of continuous ticks meant I read for that many days consecutively.

Believe me, it was addictive. Seeing the continuous ticks made me feel very good. I did not want to miss a single tick. 

A habit tracker is a fantastic tool to make an act satisfying and develop a habit. We just need to take care of two things.

1.      Just make sure we pick up one habit at a time.

2.      Bad days are inevitable, we might miss a day.   We need to make sure we never miss two days consecutively. The next day we need to show up even if for 2 minutes, read, and tick the habit tracker.

In the end, I would like to say that, one of the best ways to ensure our habits remain satisfying over the long run is to pick up behaviors that align with our personality and skills.

For example, if we are above 6 feet tall, playing basketball will be easy. It would be satisfying to build habits around basketball. But if we are just 5 feet tall, trying to play basketball won’t be very satisfying. Because it would be very difficult to dunk and basket like others.  

We need to work hard on things that come easily to us and build habits around them.