When you hear the word habit, what comes to mind?
For me, I think about habits as doing something frequently. Every day, every other day, or at least weekly.
Sometimes we overestimate starting a new habit as something that needs to require a ton of willpower to do.
An example of this would be working out several times per week.
Today I am here to tell you that some habits only require a one-time action.
Habit Hack #1: “One-Time Action“
This one-time action is something you do on the front end to automate the desired behavior.
I’ll give you two examples:
- Goal – Drink cleaner water
- One time action – Buy a Berkey water filter.
- Goal – Stop eating out so much.
- One time action – Enroll in a meal subscription service instead, like Trifecta.
There you have it – consistency built-in!
The most rewarding part of automating behaviors like these is how much time you can save. You only have to set it up once, and the habit is installed.
Habit Hack #2: Habit Stacking
Most of our daily actions are not conscious behaviors but are composed of habitual behaviors.
Unconscious habits generally influence other unconscious habits:
- Turning on a movie triggers wanting popcorn
- Coming home from work triggers wanting to automatically check the fridge
- Driving the car triggers wanting to smoke cigarettes
- Hearing your alarm go off in the morning triggers a response for coffee or a snooze button
You see this can work for you or against you.
Good news – you can stack your NEW CONSCIOUS habits together in a series so that one habit helps lead to the next.
What is a new habit you know you must implement now to get that result?
This could be anything.
- Take vitamins
- Work out in the morning
- Shop for food
- _____________________
Habit Stacking Explained
An easy way to make these behaviors more automatic is to pair them with an already existing habit. This is called habit stacking. Within this one routine are multiple mini-habits.
Stacking works because you break bigger change down into smaller actions to make them easier to apply in your daily routine, and because you link them together, they are easy to remember to do.
Existing daily habit:
- Brush teeth
- Wait for coffee or shower to heat up
- Walk
Habit stacking example:
- Brush teeth & take vitamins
- Wait for coffee or shower to heat up & hit some push-ups
- Walk & place an Instacart order
Take action – RIGHT NOW!
What is a new habit you can install?
How could it pair with an existing habit nicely?
You can learn more here about my worst habit and how I changed them for good.
Change isn’t easy, but it doesn’t need to be hard!
Applying one-time action to automate that new behavior change + pairing habits together into one is something I have found makes the process much more simple.
Krista Large
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