Mastering the Art of Habit Formation-R01

How to Build Habits: Using Your Wise Planner and Toddler to Make Change Easier

• Habits are formed when the rewarding feelings associated with an action demand to be repeated, leading to the development of bad habits.
• The wise planner and toddler are both important mechanisms in managing daily life, with the toddler taking care of mundane and repetitive tasks.
• To introduce a new behavior into our lives, we can use energy-saving mechanisms to make it easier and focus on small changes.
• The best way to make change easier is to create new routines and turn them into habits, using the wise planner to construct the first trail and the toddler to initiate the action effortlessly.
• To create a habit, break down the vague goal into clear, separate actions, making the action itself as easy a threshold as possible.
• Create a routine and include clear triggers that the toddler can pick up later on, such as a specific time, place, or object associated with the action.
• Repeat the action regularly, ideally every day, until it becomes a habit that is kicked off automatically by its trigger.
• It takes anything between 15 and 250 days until a new habit is established automatically by its trigger.
• Make the action or behavior itself more enjoyable to make it pleasurable and easier to repeat.
• Starting is the easy part, but continuing to do it every day is the hard part, which gets easier as you keep going.
• There are no silver bullets for change, but the science of habits is a reminder that change is possible and a direction, not a destination.
• Being a little bit more healthy or knowledgeable is a million times better than being unhappy about a thing and changing nothing in the end.