You can't change who you are today. But you can change who you will be tomorrow. Don't you have this creeping feeling that you have all this unrealized potential? Don't you think you could live a much better life in regards to your own behavior? Do you want to be fitter? Do you want to be healthier? Do you want to be smarter? Do you want to be prettier? You can!
You just have to change your habits. And you change your habits by all the small behaviors that lead to these habits. If you want to be fitter, go to the gym today. You say: But it doesn't matter if I go the the gym today or tomorrow." And I hear you. It is true. It only has a little effect on your body if you do or don't go to the gym today. Or if you do or don't eat this donut. It does however starts rewiring the neurons in your brain. It will start the habit formation process. Or if you already started, it will carve the habits deeper.
Habits work in both directions, positive and negative. If you come home and instantly start watching videos or play video games, this will become your habit. You think that you chose to do this today, but in reality you chose to do this every day until the rest of your life. You think that today, after a long day of work, you sit down to play video games. But in reality you set the foundations to play video games on every day to come.
Yes, there is no universal good or universal bad behavior. But you know what behavior is good. You feel it. It is the behavior that is congruent with your own values and believes. It is the behavior that will lead you towards your own goals.
Habits are the choices that all of us deliberately make at some point, and then stop thinking about, but continue doing often every day.
At some point, we consciously made a choice to go to the gym or not. To study late or to leave the library early. But at some point, we stopped thinking about it and just continued this behavior.
We humans can do things that are against our habits. We can have the habit of sleeping late, but still get up early tody. And we can have the habit to procrastinate, but work on an important project. But every time that we act against our habits, it is very difficult. For this reason, smokers have it so difficult to quit, and obese people often stay obese. Not because it is difficult to do sport or live in a caloric deficit, but because they have the habit of smoking and over-eating.
But we all know people that successfully quit smoking and successfully lost weight. They changed their personalities. They change from being a smoker to a non-smoker. And from a person that does little sport and eats too much and too unhealthy to people that have a healthy diet and exercise regularly.
Whenever we do the right thing, we not only get closer to our goals, we also model our brain. Our brain is constantly evolving and changing. We are a different person from the person we were yesterday, and a completely different person than we were five years ago. Because we made experiences, behaved in a certain way, and thus molded our brain into the shape it is now. Every decision is registered, and it learns our current behavior, which gradually changes into a habit.
43% of actions that we do each day are not performed as a result of an active decision, but enacted habitually while thinking about something else (see Wood et al Habits in Everyday Life: Thought, Emotion, and Action Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 83, No. 6, 2002).
Eating one burger does not make you obese. Skipping gym once doesn't make you weak and does not induce atrophy. Skipping classes once doesn't mean you will fail the course. But they change your brain, step by step, into a person that you don't want to be.
Similarly, not talking back to your partner if he mistreats you, is also a gradual progress, and might result in an abusive relationship down the road. Commuting open on the other hand is often difficult in the moment. But it helps our brain to learn how to do that.
Habits have a trigger and provide a reward. You can reprogram your habits by attaching to a certain trigger a different behavior that provides the same reward as the undesired habit.
For example
If you have the trigger that you play video games when you have anxiety over the future or feel exhausted after a long day of work, and the rewards are relaxation and a feeling of accomplishment when finishing something ingame, substitute video games with a walk or with a nap for the relaxation and cleaning the room or solving a leetcode question for the accomplishment.
| Trigger | Habit | Reward | Substitute action |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coming home after a long day of work, feeling tired and exhausted. | Binge-watching Youtube videos or Netflix | Relaxation |
|
Being stressed.
|
Playing video games | Distraction |
|
If you want to learn to draw, say to yourself: "I draw one line each day." This is very easy to do, and will build into a habit. And since motivation follows action, after you drew one line, you will probably continue to draw a few more lines.
If you want to learn Leetcode questions, don't say: "I will solve 5 Leetcode questions each day." but instead aim for: "I will read the task of one leetcode question each day, and write one line of code."
If you want to advance in your thesis, go to the library each day.
Set yourself up for success. Have your room cleaned and inviting. Create a positive, productive environment. Have your desk completely empty, just with your notebook on top of it. Deactivate Youtube and other social media on your computer and your phone.
If you are an alcoholic, don't have alcohol at your home, but instead good alternatives, like tea, coffee and malt coffee.
If you are obese, don't have unhealthy food at home, especially no sugar or sweets. But have plenty of healthy food, like rice, bell pepper, onions, lettuce, corn, cottage cheese, summer squash etc.
If you want to quit smoking, don't keep cigarets at home.
The trick is always the same. Do something that requires a little bit of discipline and effort, like throwing out all cigarets, booze and sweets. Instead of keeping them at home and having to constantly fight against the urge. The most disciplined, productive, laborious, fit people don't have to constantly have to fight the urge. They just don't have as strong cravings. Just like most of us don't have to be disciplined not to take drugs like cocaine and heroine. We just never tried it, and thus have zero urge to use them.
If you are video game addicted, deactivate your gaming computer and only use a weak machine that doesn't run games for you daily office work. A laptop without dedicated GPU for example. There are many ways to deactivate your gaming rig, like getting rid of your Ethernet cable and your wifi controller. Or getting rid of your monitor.
If you are addicted to your phone, don't take it with you to work, the library or university. Just leave it at home. Also don't wear it at your body, where it is easily reachable. Burry it deep in your backpack. Keep it turned off all the time, and only look at it twice a day to answer messages.
According to Charles Duhigg in his book "The Power of Habit", keystone habits are single habits that have such a positive impact on the life that they turn the life around. Like when a woman was obese and smoking, unable to hold a job for a year and was left by her husband, she decided she wanted to do a track through the desert. And for this, she quit smoking. And because she did that, she improved her life in other areas as well, substituted smoking through running, getting a job that she held over 5 years, got engaged again, ran marathons etc.
Making your bed each day in the morning is
These small things have a huge impact on our lives, because we all love to live in a tidy space, but often think we wouldn't have the time to tidy up. But throwing away a little trash, wiping some dust from a surface and writing an appointment into the calendar are done in no time.
This also accumulates, because everything that you tidy up now does not have to be tidied again for at least some time.