Maintaining A Habbit

Habits are hard to start and even harder to maintain, without careful consideration of your own ability it can be impossible to improve your own life through the acquisition of new habits and or skills. Hopefully with this post you can learn and use the tips so that you can master the habits you are trying to create in your life.

Do less than you think you can handle 

A tip that seems contrary to the normal advice, this tip encourages you to take on less than you think is possible. This encourages you to build the repetition of the habit by taking on a lesser workload. 

Because the hardest part of having a habit is maintaining it, this tip conveniently bypasses that and also can lead to a sense of accomplishment from minimal work.

Add stakes 

Stakes are a great way to enforce habits. We all know that having a forfeit is better than having a reward, so for example if you had to give your friend £100 if you didn't lose 10lbs in 2 months then the knowledge that you are going to lose £100 can be an incredible motivator.

This is also a great tip because if you are reluctant to start your habit or feel your motivation weakening, it means all you have to do is put more at stake.

To reinforce this tip the best thing to do is to have somebody hold you accountable, let a close friend keep track of you and more importantly keep sure that if you fail to build the habit they will enforce the punishment.

Prioritise it 

This tip seems obvious but for many it isn't, if you are wanting to build the habit of learning and playing the guitar, you need to prioritize it within your day, it's not good enough to say to yourself I will try and fit it in when I can because that is too flexible. 

A top tip for learning a skill; spend 20minutes after waking up building the habit and 20 minutes before going to bed. This has been proven to accelerate the time it takes for you to learn the habit and/or skill.

eliminate distractions 

Another tip that seems simple but many ignore, if you are trying to build the habit or reading 10 pages a day of a book, you need to eliminate the things that will keep you from building that habit, possibly it is your phone distracting you from reading, or the television. It is impossible to build habits if you aren’t doing them and it is impossible to do them if you are distracted.

These are some top tips on how you can build and reinforce/ maintain your habits, so whether it is losing weight, learning a language or reading a book you can be safe in the knowledge that if you use these tips you'll be on your way to building a successful habit and achieving your goals.