Habits either build you or destroy your life. Your way of living will be determined based on what type of habits you choose to be in your life. To build habits that help in your progress and growth, you need to choose the proper habits and you need to maintain them consistently.
We all build habits but when it comes to the execution part i.e. maintaining those habits in our routine becomes the most challenging phase for many of us.
There are some steps you need to follow in order to build habits that last longer. Let’s go through those steps in more detail…
Table of Contents
5 Steps To Build Habits That Last Long
1: Get Started
Always think less and work more. Don’t wait for tomorrow to start a new beginning, start now, right now at this moment.
The best time to start something is yesterday and the next best time is today.
To build habits you need not wait for a particular day, start wherever you are and start doing them right now.
In this first step, you need to do these three things:
- Start Now
- Start Small
- Start Smart
Start Now
There is no waiting for time to build habits, start right now because starting early and building habits is the best way to not regret life in the life of not building them at that time.
Start Small
Starting with tiny changes in our life is a game changer because as soon as you see results from those habits you’ll be over-excited and the probability of you continuing this habit will increase significantly.
Start Smart
It means you need to start practicing that habit every day in the way that you practiced on day one. With the same excitement, confidence, and interest you need to practice that habit.
2: Get Going
No matter how hard you try to build habits consistently in your routine, there’ll be sometimes you skip or due to some reason you leave that habit.
Skipping habits one or two times a month is a considerable amount and you need not be tough on yourself to maintain that habit consistently entire 365 days.
Because a lot of factors such as burnout, mental stress, and depression can entirely make you quit and give up on your goals.
So we shouldn’t force ourselves and be tough on ourselves from the beginning itself. Because if your beginning is tough, you end up quitting in the beginning itself.
But when the beginning is easy, you tend to continue to build habits in the long run.
In step two, you need to keep these points in your mind:
- Skipping habits are OK to some extent.
- Don’t think about results for a while
- Don’t be tough on yourself at first
- Crawl first before you run (start small and take baby steps)
- Start every day with the same excitement and interest
- Reward yourself for making the process going
3: Get Better
Now you’re in a flow state of habit building. To build habits for the long term you need to make sure that you won’t disturb your flow state.
Because once your flow state breaks, it becomes hard for you to regain that momentum. Once you are hit with the feeling of regret, you tend to lose confidence in yourself.
Reluctantly, you’ll not be able to carry forward that habit in your life.
In this step three, our main agenda is to avoid breaking the flow state.
To avoid the flow state from breaking you need to do three things:
- Take Breaks
- List Things Out
- Never Say Anything
- Reward Yourself
Take Breaks
Taking small breaks will not only make you stress-free but also improve your productivity.
Make sure your work and break ratio is 6:1. This Means if you work 6 hours then you are eligible to take an hour of rest.
At break time you’re not allowed to work on other tasks, remind that you’re taking breaks to improve your focus not to reduce it even more.
You can do meditation, warmup exercises, jogging, etc. to improve your mind and focus.
Because the more you focus, the less time you’ll take to do things.
List Things Out
While you’re focused on your habit building, meanwhile your mind pops out different types of thoughts that’ll disturb your focus.
To stop the shower of thoughts, you need to collect them so that further thoughts won’t pop out from your mind.
To do this you need to list out the things in your journal so that you won’t get disturbed by those thoughts.
Even though those thoughts seem to be useless there’ll be some thoughts that are game-changing.
So journaling them will help you identify the thoughts that’ll change your life.
Never Say Anything
To build habits that you want in your life, what you need to tell someone is nothing.
Yes! You heard right…
The moment you tell what habits you’re going to adopt in your life to someone, two consequences may arrive:
- They tell you that you’re incapable
- They feel jealousy
Both you can’t control but what you can control already lies in you by doing nothing.
This means by saying nothing about your habits and goals you are not only building confidence but also you’re safe from external impurities.
Reward Yourself
You know very well how to enable a rewarding system in your life.
The reward may be as simple as your favorite chocolate cookie.
To build the habits that you want, rewarding yourself will help you maintain your flow state but the only thing that you need to do is to be honest to yourself.
By doing these things, you maintain your flow state and gradually you get better at habit-building.
4: Get Dumb
Have you ever thought to use your mind’s negativity to reflect positivity in your life?
I think you never thought right!
But if you can’t control negativity you make it work for you by tricking your mind to do so.
It’s better to manage negativity rather than avoid it.
Here in step 3, to use your mind’s negative factors in favor of you, you need to do these things:
- Get dumb sometimes
- Use the future to frighten yourself
- Today done is better than tomorrow
Get dumb sometimes
More intelligence sometimes leads to overthinking, overexpecting, and self-sabotaging.
Sometimes getting dumb makes you think less about the results and makes you focus on your habits and goals.
To build habits what you need is consistency towards habits.
So getting dumb will make you suffer from fewer mental ailments.
How can someone become dumb?
Getting dumb means not losing intelligence but tricking your brain that you’re dumb and the only way by which you gain your intelligence back is to maintain consistency in your habits even though results won’t appear.
Use the future to frighten yourself
Frighten yourself by imagining negatively about the things that may happen in your future if you don’t build a particular habit in your life.
Like this with the fear of career growth, you probably tend to be focused on habit-building willingly or unwillingly.
That’s the power of reverse thinking and using your intelligence against yourself.
Today done is better than tomorrow
Always remember that today’s pending will always burden you tomorrow. The more you delay, the more you need to work on your habit to get back on track.
So never delay things forward, even though you are stuck with some work, Always try to complete as much as you can to avoid saturation at the end.
Do Today, Not Tomorrow.
5: Get Smart
Now you need to get smart and take smarter steps in your habit-building journey. Here you’ll observe some significant results from your habits.
Now in step 5, you need to take these smarter steps:
- Reframe your goals
- Reinvent yourself
- Redesign your life
Reframe your goals
Passing all the four steps mentioned above will take a considerable amount of time for you to examine your goals.
If you succeeded in following the above four steps then I have something to tell you…
Congrats!
Because not all will pass these steps, only the people who are willing to do so can complete these steps.
Because it tells that you have adopted a habit consistently for a 6-month period of time if you succeeded in completing the above four steps.
Now you’ll be maintaining some habits in your routine, after a considerable time spending time with your habits you know which habits you need to give more priority over others.
Reframe your habit calendar and boost the growth graph of your life.
Reinvent yourself
You grow with time and with time your habits also change. Identifying what is necessary and what is not is your main duty in effective habit-building.
To build habits, you should reinvent and review yourself at every moment whether you’re on the right track or not.
Reinventing yourself will give you a fresh start in your life and also help in saving time by not doing the things that aren’t necessary.
Redesign your life
You are the designer of your life and how beautiful your life is, will be determined by how you design it.
Purposefully redesign your life for the best things to happen in your life.
Design your life the way you want and the way you dream about it.
Conclusion
To build habits that you want, you have to be determined and have a burning desire for that habit.
Everything is impossible. But when you are determined to do something and you put your heart and soul into it then that impossible will become possible one day.
You will be going to fail for sure. But trying one more time will help you move forward toward your goal.
Building habits needs consistency, determination, and discipline without which habits won’t be adapted.
Either you suffer from the pain of discipline or the pain of regret.
Work now, to see your dream come true tomorrow.
