How to Build a New Habit: This is Your Strategy Guide

Developing good habits is essential to lead a healthy and fit life. But good habits are not so easy to make. Developing good habits is a process that requires regular effort and discipline. Most people focus on the result rather than the process. It is the process that people should learn because it comprises of learning and implementing good habits. If you are also finding it difficult to build a new habit, we list down a strategy guide.

• To learn a new habit the first thing that you must do is to start with a very small habit. The habit must be so easy that you cannot say no to it. Building new habits is difficult because people have no motivation for it. But when the task is a little easier you have that motivation and willpower to complete it. Like for example, you want to start running to lose weight. Do not start with targets like running 5 miles a day when you are just beginning the process. Instead, start running for just 1 or 2 miles a day. The smaller targets will help you in learning a new habit with ease.
• After learning small new habits, try to improve. A one per cent improvement over your previous effort would lead to a drastic change. Rather than doing something big from the initial phase, you must start small and then try to improve yourself. You will find higher motivation and willpower to improve in comparison to the time you started learning the new small habit.
• When you start adding one per cent improvement to your habits, you will realize that you have made big gains in two or three months. This is the time when you must try to break your habits into chunks. Breaking your habit into chunks will help you not only maintain the momentum but also make the accomplishment of achieving the end goal much easier. Like for example, your target is to do 50 push-ups a day. To simplify the task, you can break the habit and do five sets of 10 push-ups a day.
• When you are in the process of learning new habits you would make errors, mistakes and get off track sometimes. Failure is a part of any activity. Missing your habit once will not have a reasonable impact on the long term but you must always have a plan for such failure. You must know your vulnerabilities and ways to overcome them. You must know how to bounce back from the fall. Building a new habit does not require perfection, all you need is consistency. Therefore, your focus should be on not missing the new habit on regular basis.
• Learning a new habit is a slow process and you have to be patient. You can make tremendous progress if you have patience and consistency. Learning new habits is easier in the beginning. The real test is when you have to maintain consistency and continue your habit for a longer-term. Therefore, you must try to do things with patience so that it sustains.

The above mentioned are some of the ways of building a new habit. If at any point in life you need more practical ideas to develop new habits for improving your lifestyle or you want to learn healthy habits for your body, you may get in touch with Living In Wellbeing’s expert counsellors.