Changing Habits. How can you fill your life with abundance and fulfillment? How can you create the life you truly desire?

By changing habits and establishing new empowering ones, you can you fill your life with abundance and fulfillment. You can create the life you truly desire.

How you go about your daily routines ultimately determines the life you live.

Habits are Critical to Creating the Life You Desire.

Life is all about your habits:

1. Daily routines, or habits, make up most of your life. What you do every single day over and over again combines, over time, to become the very foundation of your life.
2. Habits are automatic behaviours. When you develop a habit, it takes that action out of the realm of having to make a conscious choice every time you do it. You don’t have to think about it or make yourself do something once it becomes a habit. You just do it automatically.
3. Habits can be empowering or inhibiting. Positive habits help you get what you want while negative habits hold you back, preventing whatever you want from ever happening.
4. Positive habits create the life you desire. If you form positive habits, you are more likely to enjoy the riches and fulfillment of the good life you want.

Your habits are the most basic elements of your life. Whether you look at your day-to-day routines or your overall life, it’s made up of all the behaviours you do. Those actions practiced consistently are your habits. So by changing habits and establishing positive, empowering habits, you will live the life of your dreams.

My good friend Matthew M. McEwan, in his article Form a Habit - How To Do Anything In 21 Days contributes with a great perspective on how to form long-lasting habits. It's well worth a read, especially if you would like to gain a few extra productive hours in the morning.

“I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order and diligence,
without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time.”
–Charles Dickens

The Science Behind Changing Habits.

New research by Phillippa Lally and others at University College London has recently shed light on the science behind habit development.

Here are the results of their research and some suggestions for changing habits based on their findings:

1. A behaviour must be repeated 66 times consecutively before it forms a habit. If you’ve ever tried to establish a habit by performing a behaviour every day for 14 or 21 days, it probably didn’t work because you did not do the behaviour enough times in a row in order to successfully develop the habit. Try it again, but this time for 66 days.
2. Repeat the behaviours in the same setting or situation. You are more likely to form a habit when you keep doing a behaviour in the same place and/or situation. Where you are affects habit formation.
   • In essence, if you carry out the new behaviour in the same place each time, you are more likely to successfully form a habit.
   • Ideally, perform your behaviour in the same room for the first 66 days. Whether you do this in your home, office or elsewhere, keep it in the same locale at first, and then you can expand to apply it in other places after you have established it as a habit.
3. Forming a new habit is “cue-dependent”. Whether you form a habit depends somewhat on cues in your environment. There are 2 types of such cues, according to Lally and the other researchers: situational and contextual.
   • Situational cues originate from your environment or location while contextual cues are other behaviours you do in conjunction with or related to the new behaviour.
   • An example of a situational cue is what you see in the morning when you first enter your kitchen: you see your coffeemaker and then you make some coffee. Your coffee maker is, therefore, something that triggers you to make your morning coffee, which you do every morning out of habit.
   • An example of a contextual cue in this case of morning coffee is that as soon as you shut off the alarm and put on your dressing gown, you head to the kitchen to prepare your coffee. Getting up and putting on your dressing gown triggers you to go make your coffee.
4. Consistency is an important key to changing habits or establishing new ones. Results of the research also emphasize the importance of consistency when trying to form a habit – especially at the beginning stages of creating the habit.
   • Although the researchers found you could skip a day when trying to establish a habit, it’s unknown how many total days you could skip during the 66 days and still successfully form a habit.
   • During the studies, those who skipped days initially during the 66 day period were less likely to successfully establish a habit. One could theorize that you are setting up your brain to become accustomed to a habit early on in the process.
   • Make a pact with yourself to repeat the behaviour for at least 66 days without fail. Start the new behaviour at a time that you are fairly sure you can repeat the desired behaviour without interrupting your new routine.
5. Pair the new behaviour with one you already do regularly. For example, if you want to start flossing your teeth, lay the package of floss right beside your toothpaste, or even on top of it, to be reminded to floss after you brush your teeth. Be consistent about flossing your teeth every single time you brush them.

Focusing on what you really want it life, developing and changing habits that support those goals, will ensure you live the life you seek. Applying the information from this research will help you succeed in developing these new, positive habits.

Let’s take a look at negative habits and their consequences, substituting positive habits for negative habits, and developing new, empowering habits.

Please Click On The Link Below.

Changing Habits. Negative Habits and Their Devastating Effects.

“Our character is basically a composite of our habits.
Because they are consistent, often unconscious patterns, they constantly, daily, express our character...”
–Stephen R. Covey