How to Create Habits that Stick
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I was never a habits guy. I thought people just wake up, do what they are told to do and go to sleep. My life was in a mess.
I didn’t drink enough water. As a matter of fact, water was just a thing I would drink when I saw it. I never exercised. And if I did, the one time I did I would praise myself for months for accomplishing such an enormous task.
I would look at a book and would just be scared of reading it. I mean that whole thing in a day? Back in my primary school days, a friend of mine had told me that his mom reads a book in a day.
I adopted that mindset for a while. Silly me. It governed most of my life and if I didn’t read a whole book in a day, I would feel like a failure.
As it turns out, that costed me a lot. It costed my academics too.
It wasn’t until I stumbled upon James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits, that my life changed.
Everything is just habits and you don’t need to read a whole book in a day. You can read a chapter or just a page or just a paragraph or just a word.
But to break down my previous way of doing things, I needed to think differently. I had to install a new habit.
First of all, every habit goes through three phrases:
1. Distraction. Of course it is going to be hard at first. You are destroying the neuropathway of the old habit, and the emotional architecture of that old habit.
When I started to change my mindset on reading, it was difficult at first. “Just a paragraph or a page a day?”, “Am I not wasting time here?”
As you know the negative thoughts are always the first responders.
But I choose to look at it from a different perspective and did the work.
Every routing, or ritual or habit goes through distraction, approximately 20 days. 66 days to install. At 66 days, you will reach a stage where it is automatic.
It will be easy. You will get up at 5AM, automatically. You will journal, go the extra mile, or practice your craft automatically. But you have to stay with it for 66 days.
This is what I did. And I began to fall in love with reading. For the first time in my life, I could understand things.
Most of my high school life, due to the habit of “reading a book a day”, I had become a crammer. But now, I could actually understand a book. By just reading it few pages each day.
2. Confusion. This is the phase number two. After you have destroyed it, it is like a renovation. There is a mess. Now you are confused.
It is normal if you are confused. If you are confused, you are still thinking for yourself. If you are confused, it means you are growing.
“Is this the way?” I would ask myself. It was still new to me. It was working but going against everything I ever believed.
3. Integration. This is the final 20 days approximately. Integration of the new habit.
Distraction. Of course it is going to be hard for the first 20 days.
Confusion. It will be messy in the middle. You are going to feel like giving up. This won’t make sense. It is new to you.
Finally, integration. You get to the automatic part. You become a part of your new belief. Your new way of being.
It becomes easy. Here is the fascinating thing. You only use willpower, until you get to the automatic part.
With the new habit in place, I set out to use the same method in place for my other life changing activities. Gym. Fasting. Walking. Eating healthy.
And it worked.
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