The 3 Essential Steps to Forming a Habit

If you pull out a cigarette whenever you have a drink, that is a habit. Equally, if you go for a run immediately you arrive home from work, that is a habit. Habits are hard to form and hard to break. The longer you have indulged in a habit, the harder it will be to break it because you have etched it into your neural pathways. But, just as you created the etched pathway, you can unetch it through repetition of a new habit.

However, being motivated or inspired to start a new healthy habit is not enough to ensure it will happen. Forming a habit is complex, takes time and more importantly a very particular approach.

How much time does it take to form a habit?

Phillippa Lally, health psychology researcher at University College London carried out a research study on habit forming. The study examined the habits of 96 people over a 12-week period. Each person chose one new habit like drinking a bottle of water with lunch or running for 15 minutes before dinner. When researchers analyzed the data to determine how long it took to form a habit, they found that on average, it takes more than 2 months and even as long as 254 days depending on the person and the habit.

What they also discovered is that if you miss a day or two, it made no difference on the overall outcome. This is really important information because of the “what the hell” effect. You think, “Now that I’ve broken my diet, I might as well go all out and feed my face.” But that’s just self-destructive because you haven’t actually done any damage to the habit-forming process.

How do you form a habit?

There are three essential steps:

1. Reminder (the trigger that initiates the behaviour)
2. Routine (the behaviour itself)
3. Reward (the benefit you gain from doing the behaviour).

1^st Step:          First, think of what your new habit will be. Let’s choose an arbitrary new behaviour like learning a relaxation technique – the aim being to create new pathways in the brain to remind you to employ the technique when stressed.

2^nd Step:         Attach this activity to another habit in your life. List all the things you do every single day, like brushing your teeth, having a shower, catching the bus to work etc. Choose the most appropriate and most closely related activity that is already a habit and decide to do the new activity immediately after it. It could be:  come home from work, change my clothes and do the deep breathing before preparing dinner. Now it is wedged nicely between two activities. It could mean dinner is a little later, but what an achievement you will feel now that you are creating this new habit.

3^rd Step:         It’s important to start this new habit with baby steps. If you decide your new habit is to meditate for 30 minutes every day, that will be a tough one to maintain. But how about, as we are doing in the challenge, just 10 minutes a day of deep breathing? That is doable even for the busiest person.

4^th Step:         Reward yourself. This reward could be something as simple as telling yourself out loud what a star you are. Or you might have a chart on your wall where you stick a gold star for every day that you do the activity. Or perhaps half an hour of a favourite show on TV. You decide on the reward but make it tangible – something seen, felt or heard.

Then it takes perseverance until the pathways in the brain are formed and, at that point, you will actually feel bad if you don’t do that activity. That’s the stage you want to reach.

A few tips to help the process of forming a habit

• Tell friends or colleagues what you are trying to achieve so they will encourage you and ask about your progress.
• Do the activity with a friend so you are under an obligation and are accountable to someone else.
• Make a bet with someone as to the outcome of your habit-forming activity. You will hate to lose the bet.
• Give a friend a particular sum of money and he pays you an amount every day you do the activity and donates the same sum to charity for every day you don’t. Work out the figures to cover at least 2 months and make the sum substantial enough to matter.

Okay, what are you waiting for?

The 2-week Life Balance Challenge starts in 3 days (Thursday 18^th Feb EST) and you will have 6 habits to form but only one at a time. It’s time to get your lifestyle sorted so that it doesn’t exacerbate your IBS symptoms any longer. Use the information in this article to give you a head start once you begin.

But make sure you sign up now HERE! It’s completely FREE.