How to change your habits

Habits are those actions that we often repeat automatically in different areas of our lives. A habit can be something as simple as eating, sleeping or moving, but there are other customs that are not as intuitive or easy to perform.

Therefore, in this article Psychology-Online we are going to explain how to change your habits and make them consolidate, The hardest part. Discover various tricks to get good habits and how long it takes to achieve it. At the end, you can go deeper into the matter in our video on how to change your habits with tricks to increase your willpower.

Index

1. what are habits
2. How to change habits permanently
3. How to create good habits
4. How to consolidate good habits
5. Example of how to change habits

Habits are those actions that we carry out in our day to day automatically. To better understand how they work, two realities must be taken into account. On the one hand, habits are our second DNA, since our identity is “what we are” plus the habits we have. On the other hand, we must accept that it is not usually difficult for people to change the actions to which we are accustomed.

In fact, it is very difficult to consolidate habits such as playing sports, having more positive reactions, improving one's temperament, keeping to bedtime and getting up, etc. It's hard to change these types of habits for oneself, so it is important to have someone who helps us face the change, be it a friend, our partner or a mentor.

The difficulty of changing habits lies in our brain, specifically, in the neural pathways. The good news is that, as difficult as it is, we now know for sure that yes we can make changes in our lives and consolidate them in the form of habits or even rituals, the advantage of which is that they do not require external motivation to be completed. The key to achieving this is the neuroplasticity of the brain, that is, the ability of the brain to change and create new neural pathways.

If you want to know more about how habits work, in this article you will find information about What is a habit and how is it acquired?.

What to do if I want to change and incorporate a new habit into my life? We see it below step by step:

1. Convince yourself that you can changeEven that requires a lot of effort. According to the research work of the professor of psychology at Stanford University, Carol Dweck, collected in her book The New Psychology of Success, one of the keys to success in changing habits is knowing that you can change.
2. Make changes that are easy to incorporate into your life: Try to make them reasonable and as realistic as possible.
3. be constant: the brain must receive a new indication and, initially, it will present resistance, which can cause discomfort. Therefore, if you want to change habits, it is important not to stop insisting until the brain gets used to them.

What people manage to make significant changes in their lives? Those that incorporate habits to personal motivation. The people who fail to try to change aspects of their lives are those who cede all responsibility to motivation. The motivation is the main enemy for changeSo it doesn't work for a long time. All of this is in line with the 3R theory of coaching to face changes: reminders, repetitions and rituals.

Is there a trick to acquire good habits? Establishing them from scratch is difficult, so here are some ideas to start having good habits:

• Link the new habit to an already consolidated one: For example, if you want to incorporate the routine of doing a healthy physical activity every day, such as doing push-ups, you can associate it with the habit of brushing your teeth, something that does not cost you effort and that you do always. So, right after you finish brushing your teeth, do 10 push-ups.
• Link the new habit to a primary need: Continuing with the previous example, if you want to start exercising and you don't know how to do it, try do it right when you finish doing an action for which you don't have to find a moment, it just happens, like pee. This way, right after you finish urinating, you automatically do 10 push-ups.

If you doubt about how to make the changes in habits consolidate, then we will show you how to do it step by step:

1. Consciously assume that you can achieve it.
2. Prepare to make an important effort to be constant.
3. Define a reasonable habit change that fits our identity.
4. Execute the change of habit right after another one that you have very established, ideally one that is automatic and timeless.

How long does it take to change habits?

How long does it take to create a habit? There is a lot written about this. Prestigious sources of information say that 21 days is enough, although other sources speak of 30 days or even more than 200 days. nothing is exact because in reality, depends on the difficulty of the habit and the frequency with which you want to establish. It is not the same to do ten push-ups once a day than five times. In this article we tell you how it works adaptation to change according to psychology.

In the bestseller "atomic habits” by the author James Clear mentions the following: "Value a lot the small changes that we manage to consolidate, do not waste the fact of being able to change something, even if it is very little". It is common to have the tendency to think that if we do not achieve a great achievement, it is worthless. That's not true, well small achievements are of extraordinary value because they create new neural pathways that allow us to grow.

Pat Riley, probably the best basketball coach in NBA history and former coach of Los Angeles Lakers, when he joined the team, it was a long way from the Boston Celtics. As a coach, he managed to reverse the situation by improving 1% each week in the four most relevant aspects of the game. The weekly improvement was negligible, but the end result was extraordinary.

Next, we leave you with a video to delve into how to change habits and consolidate them with tricks to increase willpower.

This article is merely informative, at Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

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