How to Build Positive Habits

Written By: Destany Filicetti

For most of us, a typical day might include waking up, brushing our teeth, going to work, coming home, cooking, watching television, and going to bed. This is considered a routine but within this routine lies many habits. Some habits you may be fully aware of while others may be completely automatic. These habits have a tremendous effect on the outcome of your life and determine the type of person you become. If you want to enter that growth stage and fulfill your potential, you need to develop positive habits but first let’s define habits. 

What are Habits

Habits, in the simplest terms, are things you do on a regular basis. They are small activities but they can have a very large impact on your life. Repeatedly performing the same action shapes who you are, having influence over your beliefs and results. Habits require making decisions which can affect your happiness, health, and success therefore learning how to develop positive habits can truly change your life. 

Building Good Habits

Habits may seem minuscule by nature but over the long-term, they create very large results. Every action we take has the power to help us grow, maintain the status quo, or contribute to our decline. Ultimately, who we become is reliant on our habits therefore building good habits is imperative.  Since change takes time, we should try to avoid expecting immediate results from our habits. Instead, it is much more reasonable to focus on building small habits and achieving small goals in the process.

To begin, define the qualities and habits of the person you wish to become. For example, who is the type of person that is a professional writer? They keep an orderly routine, write every day, and they do not procrastinate. By learning or positioning yourself as the person you want to be, you can begin to identify the areas and the habits you need to focus on.

Experiment: Habit Tracking

Habits determine how you spend your time. Learning how you spend your time will effectively allow you to see where you can make improvements or changes to implement new habits.

Challenge yourself to track your habits for an entire week. Write down everything you do including meals, social time, and social media each day and highlight each activity as essential (yellow highlight), productive (green highlight), or not productive (pink/red highlight). Also, make sure to include the amount of time spent while performing each activity. This experiment will provide insight to your daily routine and give you an idea of where you can make changes for improvement.

Download the habit tracker file below to get started 

How Habits Work

Every habit starts with a three part process, resulting in a physiological pattern. The three steps are: cue, routine, and reward. In order to implement new positive habits in your life or perhaps break existing habits, start by identifying each component of your behavioural loop.

Cue

Every habit begins with a cue. The cue is the prompt that tells your brain to go into autopilot. It is the beginning of the three part process and can be triggered by a location, a time of day, an emotional state, individuals around you, or an immediately preceding action. For example, having a dry throat will prompt you to have a drink, or flushing the toilet will prompt you to wash your hands. These cues can be very subtle but nonetheless they are a large component of the habit loop.

Routine

The routine is the action that follows the cue. Once the cue is triggered an action will follow (the habit). The development of habits may be recognizable at first but once it becomes habitual, the process is less obvious because our brains go into autopilot. For example, if you become stressed you may tap your finger as a coping mechanism or if you become bored you may pick up your phone and scroll through social media for hours. This process remains automatic because of the final component, the reward.

Reward

The reward is the end result of the habit loop. It reinforces your behaviour because your brain now associates this reward with a particular action. Going back to the previous social media example, when you become bored you may pick up your phone and scroll through social media for hours and the reward is entertainment. The feeling of happiness you get from this form of entertainment is rewarding therefore your brain associates these happy feelings with the act of using social media. Because of this reward, in the future, you are more likely to use social media again, when you come across the cue of feeling bored.

Be Cautious of Instant Gratification

Many habits offer immediate rewards also known as instant gratification. Although the rewards are very compelling at the moment, we have to be careful to limit habits that eventually lead to your decline.

For example, after a long day at work, you might come home to play video games to unwind. Playing video games provides temporary relief and excitement, which can encourage you to spend more and more time playing. One hour of video games could turn into 5 hours every night. Eventually you may realize that all the time you spent playing caused you to neglect other goals in your life. Now that this habit is heavily reinforced and ritualistic, it is much more difficult to break.

Creating Good Habits

Now that you understand the habit loop it is time to optimize each step in order to help make the routine more automatic for positive habits. In order to build good habits, you need to make the cue obvious, make the routine enjoyable, and most of all start with short term rewards.

Make the Cue Obvious

Making a cue obvious and visible will help you start building better habits. For example, if you are trying to eat healthier, make healthier options readily available. Our physical environment influences our desires. We tend to develop a desire for something because it is an option. James Clear (Author of Atomic Habits), highlights that we don't have to be the victim of our environment, we can be the architect; meaning if we want to do something more frequently we have to make it more accessible. 

Make the Routine Enjoyable

When the cue is obvious it will trigger a positive action. This action should also be easy to perform and enjoyable in order to help develop the habit. This could include cutting up fruits and vegetables to ensure ease of access and to limit the preparation time when you are looking to have a snack.

By making the routine easier you are more likely to choose a specific action. When you are hungry, would you rather go to the grocery store and cook exactly what it is you are craving or would you rather just order it from your favourite restaurant? As you can see the ease of which an action can be performed affects the desire to complete it.

Rewards

Unfortunately, habits that contribute to our growth, don’t usually come with instant rewards. For example, eating healthy for one day doesn’t result in many significant changes, however eating healthy for 3 months will have many positive results. 

Because rewards are very helpful in reinforcing habits, we can strategically implement short-term rewards to highlight our achievements. For example, although we won’t see the results of eating healthy for one week, we can treat ourselves to a latte from Starbucks as a reward for our dedication throughout the week.

Create Great Habits and Create Growth

Every one of your habits will either contribute to your growth, your decline or to maintaining the status quo. By tracking your habits you will be able to determine where you are losing productivity or missing out on opportunities for growth. To build more positive habits, focus on optimizing each component of the habit loop: cue, routine and reward. Remember to have patience with yourself as you build new habits. Results take time, but if you put the effort into building strong positive habits, you will set yourself on the path to new heights.

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Listen to the “Where Are Your Habits Leading You” Episode of the WAYDB Podcast!