Yet Another Post on Habits [fat-free edition]

There's a lot of bullshit when it comes to "habit forming" and "self-improvement" in general. This is because people constantly make up bullshit to prop themselves up. In reality, there are only a few timeless things you need to do to form new habits. The following text holds all the keys necessary for any amount of change in your life, and if you can read, review and reference it throughout your habit-ground trial, you're guaranteed to succeed.

A habit is defined as your automatic reaction to a cue. The cue can be a location, place, word, circumstance, etc... We all have automatic reactions that we've unconsciously formed throughout our lives, such as putting a car in park after driving.

Habits are distinct from memory. They're driven by a different part of the brain, the basal ganglia.

Habits are modified by creating a new reaction to the cue.

Practically, you should think of a habit as having 4 main factors:

• Cue - Thing that triggers standard routine
• Routine - Thing you do
• Reward - The satisfaction your routine gives you
• Belief - The psychological premise of your routine

The only realistic way of changing a habit is to retrain your reaction to a cue. How to do this is fairly unique to the habit and person, but the best place to start is by thinking of when you'll meet that cue and how you'll remember your alternative reaction.

Even after identifying the cue, there is some difficulty with committing to the action. This is driven by the strength of your belief and reward versus the difficulty of the new routine you're trying to implement.

Expectation here is most important. It takes, on average, 66 days to fully adopt a new habit, but it can take anywhere in the range of 22-254 days of consistent effort to act on a cue.

We often overestimate the amount of work we can do in a short period of time, while greatly underestimating what we can do in a longer period. Take habits as a conscious effort to utilize effort over time to chip at dreams and mountains.

Whatever it is, when you stick to it, you'll enjoy it more. In other words, any initial boredom or unpleasantness will fade, so just put it out of your mind and stick to your guns. Ultimately, if you're not getting results, you need to continually try different combinations of cue-recognition, routine-difficulty, internal/external reward and self-indoctrinated belief to accomplish your change.

That's it. No book, no package, no action-intent-technique™. If you just stick with those basic principles, you have the power to change any habit.