Make It Or Break It
As we’re thrown back into school, good habits are important to keep your grades up. The thing about these habits is that they are hard to make. Maybe you try to go to bed earlier so that you can wake up ready for school, but then you look at your clock and it’s three in the morning. So the question is, how can you stick with these habits to make your life easier?
We have all run into the issue of starting our habits for maybe a day or so, then just forgetting to keep with them. The best place to start to master your habits is to understand why good habits are important to develop early on in your life. In an interview with a certified life coach, Megan Abbott, she stated that, “Behavioral patterns we repeat most often are literally etched into our neural pathways. So establishing positive habits in your teen years can literally wire your brain for a lifetime of success and happiness.” Once you develop a habit that makes you happy, you can continue being happy for longer.
Now that that’s out of the way, it is a little bit easier to force yourself into a habit if you remember why you’re doing it.
Habits can really be anything that you set your mind to, whether it’s going to bed at a good time, not eating cereal every day, or possibly making sure to leave yourself plenty of time in the morning. One of the best ways to make sure to stick with a habit is to start with some manageable ones. Habits are most successful when you immediately feel better after doing them. For that reason, the habits you start with should be the morning habits. Feeling better in the morning can create a ripple effect that makes you feel good all day.
Obviously this sense of satisfaction will make somebody want to keep doing it. This is why it is difficult to give up things that immediately make us feel good, such as sleeping in or eating that delicious looking donut sitting on the kitchen counter. The current comfort from performing the bad habits far outweighs the eventual pleasure of the good habits.
Doing good habits help out in the long run; going on runs, eating more vegetable, and just over all being healthy. This can be hard, especially at first, so exactly how long does it take for these actions to become natural? Even though most people probably hear that it takes 30 days to form a habit, Abbott says, “Unfortunately this isn’t true. There isn’t a hard and fast rule on how long it takes to form a habit. It can vary widely depending on the behavior, the person, and the circumstances. The latest studies suggest it takes a minimum of 21 days and an average of 66 days to form a new habit,”.
While we all know that it is difficult to make a habit, and it takes a long time to do so, it’s easier if you remember why you’re doing it. We’re just over a month into school, and most people are probably struggling after losing their habits over the summer, but you can start with simple morning habits and add on from there.