Archive for the ‘Goals’ Category

How to break a bad habit in 5 simple steps

Saturday, April 24th, 2010

Just like trying to create a new habit, trying to break a bad habit can also be simplified into a few but very important steps. I’ve used these to break bad habits with great success as well.

1. Pick a habit that you want to break. In the beginning pick a simple habit.

2. Find out why you want to break that habit. Watch videos about the dangers of it, read blogs, talk to people who’ve broken that habit, and for extremely quick results, meet people who were hospitalized because of that habit, i.e. smoking.

3. Find out your trigger that causes you to act on that habit. E.g. whenever you’re in the presence of people who’re smoking, you have an urge to smoke. So, the trigger would be you being around smokers. Whenever you feel sad you start to eat, so the trigger would be your getting sad. As soon as you sit on your couch, you turn the tv on, so the trigger would be you sitting on the couch.

4. Keep your motivation up by exposing yourself to the dangers of this habit by either reading something, watching some videos, or hanging around people who are breaking the same habit or have already broken the same habit, every single day.

5. Whenever you hit a trigger that normally causes you to act on the habit you’re trying to break, do something different right away before you can act out of habit. As soon as you sit on your couch, whip out a book and start reading it, or just stop hanging around smokers, or whenever you get sad, right away start writing in a journal.

Trick is to have a strong enough reason to break that habit. Then monitoring your triggers. As soon as you hit your trigger and want to act on your old habit, immediately put a break there. Break that pattern! If you do that enough times, trigger will get weaker. That’s pretty much all there is to it. Don’t forget that by actually trying various ways you’ll learn much more than just reading about them. Just don’t give up!

How to create a new habit in 5 simple steps

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

A lot has been written about developing habits. Even I’ve written a lot about them but I’ve found the following 5 steps to be really effective when trying to establish a new habit. I’ve actually tested these steps many times and they’ve succeeded in establishing new habits every single time.

1. Pick a habit that you want to create

2. Break that habit down into small steps, 1st step being ridiculously small and easy

3. Write down why you want to create that habit, keep asking yourself why until you start to feel good every time you think about that habit

4. Read your “why” every single day at least one time, preferably once before going to bed and once right after you wake up

5. Perform the steps every single day and increasing in intensity every week. So, you would repeat the same easy step every single day for one week and next week you would increase the intensity slightly and keep it up for second week, and then increase again for third week and so on

How to develop the habit of jogging every morning?

Saturday, April 17th, 2010

Here’s an example of a habit I am trying to develop:

Habit of running on a regular basis.

Note, this time my goal is not necessarily to walk/jog/run for 21 or 30 days or so. My goal is to improve my stamina.

I run out of breath even if I have to run for 20 metres, or if I have to climb 20 stairs. So much so that I can not talk and it takes me quite a while to catch my breath.

This was to be a life long habit! As having good stamina helps in a lot of different aspects of life. That’s why it was necessary for me to develop a habit of regularly running first! Once I had developed the habit, then I could go ahead and try to perfect my technique.

Trick is to start slowly! Sooo ridiculously slow that you’d feel silly to skip a day. And do each step every single day! Remember the point is to develop a habit first! That can only really be done by consistency!

Week 1 – wear shoes, dress up, get out the door and then come back in

Week 2 – get dressed and go down the elevator and then come back up

Week 3 – walk 5 mins (could be on the treadmill in the gym in my building, or a walk outside)

Week 4 – walk for 10 mins

Week 5 – walk for 15 mins

Week 6 – walk for 15 mins with 2 30 sec jogs thrown in, so could be walk for 7 mins, jog for 30 secs, walk for another 7 mins, jog for another 30 secs, walk for another 5 mins for a total or 20 mins

Week 7 – walk for 20 mins with 4 30 sec jogs thrown in

Week 8 – walk for 2 mins, jog for 30 sec, then repeat until 20 mins are up

Week 9 – walk for 2 mins, jog for 2 mins, repeat until 20 mins are up

I could not complete week 9 properly due to low carb diet I was trying during the same time. I had incredible lack of energy during that period. So much so that I felt faint on many occasions even after 5 minutes of walking, even though I was eating a lot and drinking a lot of water. I was just careful to limit my carbohydrates.

Anyhow, had to stop mid way for a few days because of my diet experiment (more on that later). Following week I started again but I felt I had lost my rhythm.

I still wanted to build stamina though so started researching different ways of improving it.

Came across High intensity interval training (HIIT). This really appealed to me.

Basically, you jog for a few minutes, then go all out sprinting for 15-30 seconds, then light jog again until heart rate comes down, then sprint again and so on.

Week 9: total time 10 mins; with 2 30 sec 8 mph sprints in between (treadmill) – 2 times a week; with 5+ mins of walking on rest of the days

Week 10: total time 10-15 mins; with 2 30 sec 9.5 mph sprints in between (treadmill) – 2 times a week; with 5+ mins of walking on rest of the days

Week 11: total time 15+ mins; with 3 15 sec 10.5 mph sprints in between (treadmill) – 2 times a week; with 5+ mins of walking on rest of the days

Instead of following a strict regiment of jogging for 2 mins, then sprinting for 30 secs, I just sprint for 15-30 secs then wait for my heart rate to come below 140 then I sprint again, whether that’s with in 2 mins or 4 mins.

I’m finding that it’s hard to really sprint very fast on a treadmill. I feel like I am going to fall down!

So, next session I’ll try HIIT outside!

Habits

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

Over the years I have done many experiments trying find the best way to create new and positive habits and stop bad habits. I have done numerous 30 day experiments and every single one was successfully completed. Some of the habits I kept for up to 2 years. But almost every single one of those habits eventually died down. I went back to my old habits. I just could not understand why that was so.

There has been so much talk about it taking 21 days to establish a new habit! Almost every self help book you read you’ll find something along the same timeline. How it takes 21 days to form a new habit! Unfortunately that never worked for me. And I don’t mean that I tried one habit. I tried to form new habits in many different areas of my life but even doing them for up to 2 years did not work for me, forget about 21 days!

What went wrong? Obviously 21 days worked for some people!

Maybe it was because I was forcing myself to complete my 30 day goals? I did not look at those goals or habits as long term goals. Instead I was determined to complete them for 30 days for the sake of completing them. My goal was to complete those tasks for 30, 60 or pre-determined number of days.

So, for example, my goal was to work out for every single day for 30 days. Instead my goal should have been to look a certain way, or to have more stamina and so on.

My goal was to give up sugar for 30 days instead it should’ve been to have a healthy diet.

Now I’m looking at habits a bit differently. I decide what my ultimate goal is, then I break it down into smaller and more manageable daily tasks.

E.g. one of my goals is to have more stamina. Now this is not a 30 day goal. I want to have more stamina for the rest of my life. I want that to be my lifestyle. So, I’m in no hurry in trying to achieve that. There’s no 30 day goal here. I start with ridiculously small goals for every single day.

One thing you must remember whenever trying to set a new habit is to perform it every single day.

For the first week I only put on my jogging clothes, wear my running shoes and go out the door. Then immediately I come back in. I do this for one week.

For week two, I walked for 5 mins only.

For week three, I walked for 10 mins only and so on…

Best idea is to choose habits for life instead of for short term. If you think about habits in that sense you would realize that there is no rush. Go at a slow pace. Stretch yourself only enough that you don’t mind and you don’t get any resistance from your mind.

So, the first week do something very small. Each week, increase the intensity a little bit. This way before you know it, you would have developed a new habit.

For instance, if you wanted to develop the habit of writing a post for your blog daily.

Week 1. Pick up your computer and log onto your blog and then log off

Week 2. Start writing with a timer and write for only 5 mins, save it as a draft, which you may publish by the end of the week

Week 3. Write for 10 mins daily

Week 4. Write for 15 mins daily

Week 5. Write for 20 mins daily and keep increasing slowly but consistently

Another thing that was missing in all of my 21/60/90 day experiments was the motivation! I had incredible motivation at the beginning but eventually motivation died down and I still kept up my habit because of self discipline.

What if I had tried the following?

Whatever goal I wanted to achieve, I should’ve found sources of motivation for me. That could be watching videos, reading books, reading blog posts, listening to audio tapes regarding that goal, talking to people about it, joining groups about it (offline and online) and so on. Meaning  I should have kept my motivation high.

So, I think habits also die down after a while because we feel pointless in continuing with them. We tend to forget why we really started forming that particular habit. That’s why it’s very important to have a “WHY”. We should be reminding ourselves why we are trying to set a habit, why we’re trying to achieve a particular goal.

E.g. we learn about dangers of sugar. Now we set a goal to cut sugar from our diet. As days go by we tend to slowly forget why we were cutting sugar out of our diets. We have an idea that it’s bad for us but that real intense fear is gone. That motivation is gone! We need to spark that fire again. Otherwise, temptations come in the way! We’re surrounded by wonderful tasting foods that have sugar in them! Not to mention people eating items containing sugar all around us, and let’s not forget the advertising that bombards us on a daily basis!

So, we could start watching videos of dangers of sugar or dangers of high fructose corn syrup. And also, keep yourself busy with reading research documents, visiting blogs about their dangers and so on. Spend some time daily on doing this along with setting small daily tasks of eliminating sugar from our diet. Then see what happens!

Pretty soon you will realize that your mindset has shifted. You will automatically become conditioned to think that sugar is bad for you. And I think that’s the best form of motivation there is. Once you develop a belief then you will not have to force yourself, or discipline yourself to do anything. You will stop having foods that contain sugar or HFCS automatically. You will not even feel like having them :-)

So, the biggest thing I’ve learned from my years of experimenting with trying to set new habits or eliminate bad ones is that we need to keep burning the fire of motivation, we need to keep reminding ourselves why we’re continuing with our 21/30/60 day experiments!

Right now, one of the habits that I’m working on is writing for my blog for 5 minutes daily! Instead of writing and posting, I just write for 5 minutes in google documents then when I feel it’s enough for a post, I just publish it on my blog.

So, do not be surprised if the quality goes down a little bit. I’m trying to write a half decent blog but more importantly setting a habit of writing every single day!

That’s where I find we go wrong! We try to achieve too much too fast! If we do not develop a habit of doing something on a consistent basis, what happens when we’re really feeling down, or tired, or just are not motivated anymore, or something else of importance comes to our life? We take a break! After all it’s just one day!

But before the habit is ingrained in your subconscious mind, no breaks should be taken! None! Even if you spend 2 minutes on your habit, do it! But do not skip a day without performing a task towards your goal!

And make sure you keep your motivation high for the first few weeks especially! 30 day experiments are fine if you consistently keep reminding yourself why you’re involved in this experiment in the first place!

Haven’t been updating the blog…

Friday, January 8th, 2010

It’s been quite a while since I’ve updated the blog. I’ve actually been quite busy lately with lots of things on the go. I really want to write about my experience in India. I was there for two weeks and all I can say is that it was one of the best experience of my life.
At the same time, I am experimenting with different goals so that’s keeping me busy too.
I’ve tried establishing a lot of new habits over the years but majority of them have fallen through. So, I’ve been trying to find ways to establish new habits.
Stay tuned…