Replace Bad Habits With Good Ones - Step 3

Or at least make the bad ones harder to do.

Those posts are fragments from my book “Short Practical Guide to Mental Health“, therefore they're, exceptionally, behind the paywall. You can purchase the book here.

Photo by Tamarcus Brown on Unsplash

“The only thing more powerful than intelligence is discipline”

Or at least make the bad ones harder to do, and vice versa. Want some practical examples? Here you go:

• Put a vase filled with fruit on the table, and put the sweets somewhere you can’t see them.

• Drink a glass of water with every meal. Put a big water bottle where you usually eat. 

• Keep your running shoes by the door and lay out your workout clothes the night before to make it easier to go for a morning jog.

• Create a to-buy list before going to a store.

These things are easy to do, yet they are also easy not to do. I personally started reading books instead of scrolling through social media while I’m on the toilet. If you want to implement it too, leave your phone behind and keep a book there instead. It’s a small and easy to implement habit that will make your life better over time. Not today, but in years. Small habits make a big difference over time. Many diseases are the result of years of neglecting your health. One cigarette won't kill you; one cigarette per day for 20 years will.

Another equally important thing is persistence. Everyone is able to start, but only a few are able to keep doing the thing even when it's not profitable for them at the time. 

In the age of internet, everyone can become richer. The vast majority of people want to be richer, so they start some kind of internet business. But the vast majority give up after some time. They haven't really gotten anywhere, yet they are already leaving and going to seek another thing to start. I said that everyone can become richer, but the sentence should actually be: everyone who can persist and discipline themselves, acknowledging the struggle of a process, can.

People are naturally inclined to search for some instant fix that will solve all their problems. The truth that everyone knows but chooses to ignore anyway is that you just have to do the thing. There’s no magic solutions, courses and other products that will solve all of your problems instantly. It’s accurate in pretty much every aspect of life.   

Holistic self-improvement is what will allow you to solve problems over time. Those actions that may currently appear insignificant, seemingly unrelated to solving your problems, can surprisingly evolve into the best choices over time, and everything will start to “click”. You know what the right things are, so just do them!

At some point, I became obsessed with improving my life just a little bit, day by day. What always annoyed me was the lack of practical advice in many self-help books. They often didn't provide specific steps or insights into what exactly the author did to achieve something. Only generalities. Obviously, everyone’s situation is different, but you know what I mean: some examples to grasp the concept better. If I were about to start again today, I would begin with doing things that have a visible and fast effect, such as taking out every piece of trash that has been in your room for months every time you leave it or arranging files on your desktop. It brings me insane amounts of satisfaction, seriously. 

You can also implement that in tasks that are not this sexy. 

In video games, progress bars are there for a reason: the visual representation of progress is inherently appealing to humans. Try something just like that. Make your progress measurable and visible. Every page you write and every workout you finish, try to move a marble from one transparent jar to another. That may sound a little bit silly, but you might find yourself eagerly waiting to make the jar fuller the next day. 

I personally use a habit tracker that I have designed myself. It's wonderfully simple yet highly satisfying and effective for me. You fill in a box each time after completing a task. There are 40 days for one "habit period". Over time, it provides valuable insights into your consistency. If this piques your interest, you can find more details on my Amazon author's page. Alternatively, you can click here.

It’s also helpful to create your own “rituals”. What I mean by that is to connect, “chain” one habit with another. More specifically - an already existing one with the one you want to create. 

For example, let’s say you want to start reading 10 pages of a valuable book a day. Ask yourself, what is something that you do every day that makes you feel strange without doing it? Maybe it's the routine of preparing your morning coffee? Now, here comes the first step: place the book strategically in your kitchen, right next to your coffee-making station. This physical proximity ensures that you encounter the book as a part of your morning routine. It's the first gentle nudge to remind you of your reading goal. 

The second step is where the magic happens. The idea is to connect the act of drinking your morning coffee (an established habit) with reading (a new habit). Before you even take a first sip, open the book. 

The key is to do it every day; that’s how habits are formed. Your brain is always going