Baby steps can make a big difference.
Starting a new routine can be intimidating, but it can be easier than most of us think. Here are our top tips to make new habits stick.
How to build better learning habits
Another method of building habits is to piggyback the desired new behaviour on another that’s already habitual.
Imagine you want to make a habit of spending 10 minutes learning German vocabulary every day. Find a habit you already have and piggyback the vocabulary learning on that.
For instance, maybe you already have a cup of tea each day at 3pm. Try combining your desired habit with that existing one: so learn the German vocabulary for 10 minutes while you drink the tea.
How to create better social media habits
There’s a lot of moralising around our use of devices and social media, but only you know if your phone is stopping you from doing other more important stuff.
If you feel it is, one way to take back control is to make your device use less habitual, and the easiest trick in the book for that is to turn off notifications.
Read more:
- These 8 simple habits will help you live longer, suggest scientists
- Dr Michael Mosley’s 7 best science-backed tips to improve your health
- The 6 best habits to keep your brain fit, according to neuroscience
Notifications can act like habitual cues that prompt you to check an email or social media message without thinking, potentially initiating a cascade of related behaviours that you didn’t consciously intend to do.
Planning to use email, social media or news sites during planned windows of the day is another way to break out of habitual behaviour and ensure your device time is more intentional.
How to build better exercise habits
If you currently do no exercise at all, and the idea of forming a new exercise habit seems daunting, then you could try using the two-minute rule.
This rule comes from James Clear, the author of the best-selling book Atomic Habits. When it comes to forming a new habit, rather than setting yourself a daunting goal, he suggests starting modestly, by doing the new behaviour for just two minutes, which will make it much easier to fit into your daily routine. Then repeat it each day until it becomes a habit. Once it’s habitual you can be more ambitious.
So, if you do no exercise now, set yourself the goal of doing two minutes exercise at, say, 8am every day. It could be walking around the garden, a few step-ups, a few jumping jacks, whatever.
Keep at it, until it starts to feel automatic. From there, you can start to increase the amount gently, to five minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes and so on. If you miss a day, don’t beat yourself up. Clear says the most important thing is to get back into the routine as quickly as you can.
How to form greener habits
The psychology of habits can help explain why people’s behaviour so often fails to change in line with their evolving environmental attitudes, so although many of us recognise the need to adopt more environmentally friendly behaviours, we continue doing the harmful ones anyway.
The problem is that so many of our daily behaviours, from transport to consumption, are habitual. To help people make the change, psychologists suggest methods that draw on habit theory, including reducing friction between cues and more desirable behaviours, and vice versa.
For instance, research has shown that office paper recycling shot up when recycling bins were placed near each person’s desk rather than having one central bin; and, conversely, people took the lift less often when the doors were programmed to open and close more slowly.
Read more:
- Why are habits so hard to break?
- Why am I such a creature of habit?
- Dr Michael Mosley: The 10 most powerful daily habits for boosting your health and happiness