Habit Building: Laying The Foundations

September 10th 2007 Personal Development 29 comments

ladder building tunnel caveThere are a lot of intelligent posts written about building new habits. However a lot of them seem to focus on the later stages of the process, rather than those difficult early days where you seem to have more failures than successes. At this stage a lot of people become so disheartened when they give in to the temptation of a cigarette after the third day, or unnecessarily spend money when they promised they would become more frugal, that they stop trying altogether. This early stage often requires a different approach. It’s important you lay down the foundations of your new habit, and hopefully this guide will help you to do that.

Start small
Start out at a small level and focus purely on that for a few weeks, rather than taking on a big goal that you will have difficulty coming to terms with. Imagine it as though you are steadily climbing a ladder rather than taking a big leap straight to the fourth or fifth rung. If you want to get into the habit of eating healthy, focus first on eating healthy snacks. If you want to get into the habit of going to the gym, focus on just going on a specific day of the week to start with.

By starting out small you take away the pressures that you might otherwise feel. It’s better to stumble over the hurdles at this early stage by having small goals, rather than fall flat on your face and getting discouraged, because you picked a difficult target to reach that required all your concentration and willpower. Back to that ladder example, each rung can be an ever difficult goal. When it comes to my habit of eating healthy, the first rung would obviously be having healthy snacks, then could it be making my breakfasts healthy, then my lunches and finally - at the top of the ladder - my dinners. If I ever slip one evening and have a big, greasy burger for dinner that’s fine, I’m only going down one rung of the ladder. I still ate healthy with all my other meals that day.

Don’t micromanage
There seems to be a misconception that having lists and systems in place helps to support you in your habit building and keep your mind focused on your efforts. However, in the early days that’s part of the problem. I’ve found that I have built up habits more effectively when I wasn’t always reminded of my up-and-down progress. By micromanaging your habit building at this stage it creates two problems:

  • It puts your efforts on a pedestal. The more focus you put on the habit the more pressure you are putting on yourself. With every successful day that pressure builds. That’s fine if you thrive on it and you are consistently building up your habit. However, if one day you slip up, that pedestal will come crashing down on top of you.
  • It amplifies failure. At the early stages of habit building you are quite likely to trip up and fail to hit your goals. That’s part of the process at this stage, you are still gaining from it. Because your mind is on building up a new habit/breaking a bad habit, it’s working away subconsciously. It’s like one highway is getting closed down and a new one is being built to a better destination. Why put so much attention on the failures by having tables full of crosses from when you failed to not smoke or not go for a run in the park? This is why it’s often a bad idea to focus on more than one habit at a time. I failed to hit my targets for a few days with a particular habit and it had a knock-on effect with all the other habits I was working on. While I am certainly not saying you should brush these failures under a carpet, don’t put any more emphasis on them than you need to. You want to be able to take lessons from the situation without it discouraging you.

Focus on individual days
Part of not micromanaging is focusing on individual days rather than tracking yourself weekly or monthly. That way every little failure is not amplified and you can move onto the next day with a fresh start. Get sticky notes and put one up somewhere noticeable. Write down the habit you are working on and the day. If/when you hit your target put a tick or cross, then the next day start fresh by binning it and repeating the process. That way your efforts are purely on one day at a time and not with trying to hit a whole week or month of targets. Every success if amplified, while any failure is not a total discouragement. “Ok, I missed my target yesterday but that’s in the past now. I’m going to really go for it today!”

Fix what is holding you back first
Knowledge is power. Understanding why are in the habit of doing something, or why you are having so much trouble breaking a bad habit provides the sort of personalized information no book or guide can give you. One person I know wanted to get into the habit of going to the gym. However something was holding him back. When he was at the gym he enjoyed it, but it was getting the motivation to go in the first place. When I talked to him about it, it turned out he did not enjoy the same, repetitive walk along a busy road everyday, especially when he was going back home after an hard workout. So I suggested where possible he go with friends, listen to his iPod while he walked or - shocking I know - drive to the gym. Work out what is holding you back or making your efforts unnecessarily difficult, otherwise you will often find yourself trying to work your way through a brick wall.

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Reader discussion

Excellent advice: “Don’t micromanage”. But don’t always focus on single days as this can become a form of micromanagement, too. Example: I started tracking my weight in a spreadsheet because I wanted to lose some. For a few weeks, I kept looking at the daily weight bars, which was quite discouraging. Then, I still entered the data every day, but created a graph that shows me just a single average weight bar per week. That’s a lot more encouraging.

Mark Twain said, “Habit is habit and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.” In my experience, it’s best to ease into or out of habits, rather than biting it all off at once.

Rolf, good point about how only focusing on individual days can be the same as micromanaging. I was thinking in terms of you do it or you don’t habits, not habits like weight loss where you have to track your progress. Do you focus purely on the weight you lose, or do you focus on what you eat? I would imagine each approach requires different metrics even though the result is the same.

What great timing. I just participated in a programming contest and my entry is a simple website where you can keep track of your habits.

You can try it out using the demo account at http://whatsyourhabit.com.

Eric

James, the spreadsheet is actually for tracking my weight only. Tracking what we eat is managed by my wife - she does it a lot better than me and any software could, for sure! :-) With respect to food, we’ve made the decision to spend less on other things than buying unwholesome (but cheap) junk. Aside from that, we simply try to follow what the season has to offer, which gives us great variety. You don’t really need strawberries for Christmas, I guess.

Looks interesting Eric, pity it goes against nearly everything I said in the article :D

Those are some really good tips, it looks like habits are in the news again. I have had quite a bit of trouble with biting off more than I can chew, your advice to start small is excellent. Thanks.

I disagree with you, because I think in general, if you have chosen a sufficiently small and doable habit to change, one day is not enough to make you fall off the wagon. Rather that one day you say, “ok, I didn’t make it today, but look at all those days when I managed it! I can do it again!” Significantly, I’ve also found that the shame of having to break a chain of successes is enough to stop me from breaking resolutions - I’m currently at a chain of 46.

Claire, I agree that it is very encouraging if you can build up a chain like that. However I would argue that that comes at a later stage in the habit building process. Would it be possible to get that sort of consistency within the first days or weeks? If you can do that you probably don’t need this article.

Thank you for posting this article. I am always trying to seek ways of making good habits as much as humanly possible and this article helps tremendously. My appreciation to you is in the highest sense. To show you my gratitude I would like to share with you a website I found that also helps in this:
http://consciousflex.blogspot......holas.html

Keep up the incredible work!

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