Better's Blinkist

Small habits can have a surprisingly powerful impact on your life.

If you want to make a positive change in your life, you should recognize that change requires patience, as well as confidence that your habits are keeping you on the right trajectory – even if you aren’t seeing immediate results.

22 May, 2019 23:09 Share

The key to making big changes in your life doesn’t have to involve major upheaval; you don’t need to revolutionize your behavior or reinvent yourself. Rather, you can make tiny changes to your behavior, which, when repeated time and time again, will become habits that may lead to big results.

22 May, 2019 23:10 Share

Building new habits requires hard-to-miss cues and a plan of action.

Just take the work of Boston-based doctor Anne Thorndike. She wanted to improve her patients’ dietary habits without requiring them to make a conscious decision. How did she pull this off? She had the hospital cafeteria rearranged. Originally, the refrigerators next to the cash registers contained only soda. Thorndike introduced water, not only there, but at every other drink station. Over three months, soda sales dropped by 11 percent, while water sales shot up by 25 percent. People were making healthier choices, just because the cue to drink water rather than soda was more prominent. So simple changes to our environment can make a big difference. Want to practice guitar? Leave the instrument out in the center of the room. Trying to eat healthier snacks? Leave them out on the counter, instead of in the salad drawer. Make your cues as obvious as possible, and you’ll be more likely to respond to them.

24 May, 2019 00:05 Share

Humans are motivated by the anticipation of reward, so making habits attractive will help you stick to them.

A great technique for this is temptation bundling. That’s when you take a behavior that you think of as important but unappealing and link it to a behavior that you’re drawn to – one that will generate that motivating dopamine hit.

24 May, 2019 23:08 Share

If you want to build a new habit, make that habit as easy to adopt as possible.

The first is to focus on reducing friction.

26 May, 2019 22:22 Share

You can also use this approach to increase friction for bad habits

26 May, 2019 22:22 Share

The principle is that any activity can be distilled into a habit that is doable within two minutes. Want to read more? Don’t commit to reading one book every week – instead, make a habit of reading two pages per night. Want to run a marathon? Commit to simply putting on your running gear every day after work.

26 May, 2019 22:23 Share

Making your habits immediately satisfying is essential to effective behavior change.

Our brains, though, evolved to cope with the immediate-return environment of earlier humans, who weren’t thinking about long-term returns like saving for retirement or sticking to a diet. They were focused on immediate concerns like finding their next meal, seeking shelter and staying alert enough to escape any nearby lions.

27 May, 2019 22:54 Share

So when you are pursuing habits with a delayed return, try to attach some immediate gratification to them.

27 May, 2019 22:54 Share

Create a framework to keep your habits on track, using trackers and contracts.

You, too, can develop a habit tracker, using a simple calendar or diary, and crossing off every day that you stick with your chosen behaviors. You’ll find it effective, because habit tracking itself is an attractive, and satisfying, habit. The anticipation and action of crossing off each day will feel good and keep you motivated.

30 May, 2019 02:36 Share