This is How You REALLY Level Up: Maintaining Good Habits
How to create and maintain good habits in order to achieve your goals.
WEEKLY RECAP
Happy Sunday It Girls! As you know from my previous post, I spent the better part of my week on a business trip in Miami. I definitely enjoyed myself on trip and ate a lot of yummy food, but I was also sleep deprived from long hours and the humidity was killing my skin. So, I’m very glad to be home now. I returned home on Friday, and have just spent the last couple of days trying to ease back into my routine (and catch up on sleep). While I did my best to keep up with my routines and habits in Miami, there are always limits to how much you can actually accomplish being away from home (and working 15hr+ days… yes, that’s not a typo - I was exhausted). And it’s so easy to lose motivation to keep up your good habits when you’ve gone a few days without doing them. That is, unless you’ve already effortlessly established these habits as part of your daily routine and have a great method to ensure you remain consistent. Today, we’re going to talk about creating and maintaining good habits in order to achieve your goals, but first…
WEEKLY R.E.P.O.R.T. CARD
Reading: the notes I took from when I first read Atomic Habits in order to write this blog post lol.
Eating: more yummy Cuban food because the Cubans in Miami know what they’re doing in the kitchen.
Pinning: inspiration for how I’m going to organize and decorate my dog’s little area for when we move.
Obsessing: over Lemon8… I know I’m late to the train but the girls are having fun over there!
Recommending: Zucca, an Italian restaurant in Miami. Quite possibly one of the best meals I’ve had in the last few months.
Treating: myself to a kombucha and snacks restock now that I’m back home.
THE KEY TO LEVELING UP
Last week, I gave you an overview and blueprint for how to do a Life Audit and Create Better Goals for 2024. When discussing Goal Setting, I encouraged you to break down your annual goals into quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily goals and coined this as your “plan”. Again, it’s not enough to just say you’re going to achieve something — you need to implement actionable steps in order to reach your goals. That’s where habits come in. Habits are formed through your repeated actions (typically something you do daily or weekly) that eventually become automatic fixtures of your routine. It’s impossible to see any type of evolution within yourself, your career, your relationships etc. without the consistency of good habits in your daily or weekly routine. Good habits are are the true key to leveling up!
GOOD HABITS VS. BAD HABITS
Notice how I emphasized good habits above? That’s because a bad habit can be formed just as easily as a good one — in fact, 9/10 times forming a bad habit is easier. So what’s the difference between a good habit and a bad habit? Well, good habits are actions that result in a positive impact on your physical, mental, or emotional well-being and typically align with your goals. While bad habits, are actions that result in short-term gratifications and often negatively impact your health, productivity, and happiness.
The reason why it’s typically much easier to form a bad habit is due to the human craving of immediate satisfaction. For example, imagine you’re driving home from work and you’re tired and hungry. You have the option of either driving to the grocery store, so you can get the ingredients to make a healthy meal for dinner OR to stop at McDonald’s and grab yourself dinner from there. Clearly, your brain knows which of these decisions will have the more positive impact on your well-being, but that awareness is often clouded by the need for instant gratification. So you choose to go to McDonald’s instead, promising yourself that it’s just this one time and tomorrow you’ll actually cook dinner. But then tomorrow comes and the cyle repeats itself until going to McDonald’s becomes a habit — an automatic fixture of your routine. While going to the grocery store and cooking dinner may seem like the more difficult choice at the time, in the longrun the harder decision is often the one to provide you with the most benefit. The first step to maintaining good habits is to identify what your bad habits are and what triggers them. In other words, what is the “habit loop”? To understand the habit loop, you need to break down your bad habits into four simple questions:
What’s my cue?
What’s my craving?
What’s my response?
What’s my reward?
Utilizing our example from above, the above questions would be answered in the following way:
What’s my cue? I’m exhausted after work and McDonald’s is on my way home.
What’s my craving? I start to crave McDonald’s because it’s quicker than cooking dinner.
What’s my response? I stop at McDonald’s on my way home.
What’s my reward? I’ve satisfied my craving for McDonald’s and am no longer hungry.
Now as an isolated event, the stop at McDonald’s isn’t all that bad. But once you go every day and your brain acknowledges it as a habit, well we’ve all seen Super Size Me, right? And what happens the next day when you’re exhausted and hungry after work again, and still don’t want to go to the grocery store?
So how would you go about swapping out this bad habit loop for a good habit loop? Well first, you need to determine how important it is to you to eat a more nutritious dinner (refer back to your Life Audit), if it is important to you then you need to reframe your brain to understand that the decisions you make today will utimately impact you tomorrow. And sometimes that means making the hard decision today in order to achieve your goal tomorrow (I’m using “tomorrow” figuratively, we know Rome wasn’t built in a day). Once you have a clear understanding of that, return back to your habit loop and this time think of what good habits you can implement instead.
What’s my cue? I’m exhausted after work and the grocery store is 10 minutes up the street from my house.
What’s my craving? I start to think about dinner and what quick meals I can make tonight.
What’s my response? I stop at the grocery store on my way home.
What’s my reward? I spend 15-30min cooking myself a delicious and nutritious meal, and I now have leftovers for tomorrow.
This is only one simple example of how you can eradicate that bad habit loop. Other options may have been: grocery shopping/meal prepping in advance or even stopping at a healthier food spot instead of McDonalds. Sometimes, in order to avoid those negative triggers you need to modify your environment. In this example, it may be that you need to take a different route home where the grocery store is on the way instead of McDonald’s. Or, if we use our saving money example from last week, it may be that you need to take a step back from certain friends who want to go out every weekend in order to actually reach your savings goal. No matter how you go about it, swapping out your bad habit loop for a good one, will always pay off in the longrun.
I know you know somebody who needs to hear this!
HABIT STACKING
Now that you’ve identified what a good habit loop can look like for you, it’s time to explore how you can make keeping up with good habits even more attractive for you. Habit stacking is one my absolute favorite ways to introduce a new habit and make it a part of my routine. Habit stacking is when you identify one existing habit that you do daily or weekly, and add (or stack) a new habit that you want to maintain on top of it.
Using our example above this could look like “when I cook dinner after work, I will have my usual daily phone call with my mom,” — in this example the phone call with your mom is the existing habit and the cooking dinner after work is the new habit. Another example could be, “whenever I do laundry, I will also do a face mask and make a grocery list.” For me, personally, I always habit stack when I go to the gym by combining listening to a podcast or YouTube video along with my workout. I also know someone who has recently introduced habit stacking into their life by listening to an audiobook or podcast they enjoy while doing DoorDash.
It’s all about taking something you usually do/have to do and combining it with something you want to do/enjoy doing. This makes the good habit (or “harder decision”) more attractive to you because you know when you cook dinner, you’re going to get to catch up with your mom, and when you go to the gym you’re going to get to listen to your favorite podcast.
BABY STEPS
Now, I know introducing new habits can seem intimidating. Especially when you’re habits are aligned with a bigger goal like losing 20lbs by the end of the year. But it’s important to remember that your goal isn’t to lose 20lbs in one day, it’s okay to take baby steps towards your goals as long as you’re walking. All progress is a good progress. Please refer to the Goal Setting tab of last week’s template and remember what I said about your “plan”.
The benefit of breaking down your annual goals into quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily goals is because it allows you to take baby steps towards your goals and form lasting habits. Continuing with our losing weight example, maybe skipping McDonalds and cooking dinner every night instead is just one of your daily goals. Let’s say you typically work long hours and struggle to find time to make it to the gym, maybe a weekly goal for you is to go to the gym at least 2x a week and/or on weekends. This is a great starting point because these smaller goals are much less intimidating but you’re still making progress. Then, as these first two habits start to feel natural to you, look for ways to evolve. Maybe now, instead of just cooking every night, you want to start testing out some healthier recipes or cutting something our of your diet. Maybe you find a way to start going to the gym 3x a week or incorporating 30min of daily walking (by yourself, with your dog or with other companions). Making these small increminetal changes will ultimately help lead you to success with achieving your big goals.
I also highly recommend implementing some type of tracking method to ensure you’re keeping up with your habits. It’s incredibly easy to fall behind when you don’t have some way to consistently track your progress. I recommend utilizing my template or sourcing/creating your own goal/habit tracker. Another method I highly recommend is to utilize Todoist (or a similar to-do list app) to keep track of your daily habits. What I love about Todoist, is that it allows me to set up my daily, weekly, monthly etc. tasks as recurring and sends me reminders to make sure I get them done. When I don’t accomplish a habit by it’s due date (whether daily or weekly etc.) Todoist will not only show me that it’s overdue but it will also tell me just how far behind I am. If a daily task is only one day overdue, that’s not too concerning but if a daily task is two weeks overdue then I know I need to do some course correcting. Remember, there’s nothing wrong with course correcting. As we talked about last week, noticing that you’re not keeping up with certain good habits as much as you initially planned to could often lead you realizing that you either don’t care about the ultimate goal as much as you thought you did or that you do care but need to identify better methods to maintain the good habits (habit loop and habit stacking!).
Along your journey, I encourage you to celebrate your wins no matter how small. That’s the other benefit of breaking your annual goals down. Whenever you accomplish your daily, weekly, monthly etc. goals it allows you an opportunity to celebrate yourself and the progress you’ve made towards your bigger goals. Celebrating these smaller wins are often a huge motivating factor in ensuring you keep going and keep making progress!
BOOK RECOMMENDATION
One last thing, the bulk of this post is pulled from everything I learned from reading Atomic Habits by James Clear. I highly highly recommend this book to anyone looking to make actual positive change to their daily lives. He goes into way more detail about some of these concepts I discussed here such as breaking bad habits, habit loops and habit stacking.
And if you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading! 🖤✨
xoxo,
Bae