Habits & Success – How To Create Habits That Stick

Episode 03: Habits & Success - How To Create Habits That Stick! Show Highlights.

"The very best decision I've ever made is to learn all about Habits, how to make them and how to break them, because it has changed everything." ---T. Lavon Lawrence, Creating Your Best Self Podcast

David N. Johnson and T. Lavon Lawrence discuss what you need to know to create healthy habits that you can count on.  We go over the importance of forming good habits, how they impact your life, and how to start creating habits that are obvious, attractive, easy, and rewarding.

Good or Bad, Habits Impact Your Life Automatically

The happiest, most successful percentages of every major segment of human population are so because of habit. Every religion and philosophy reflects and teaches about habit as a cornerstone of success, wisdom, and a good life.

Yet, most of us have no idea how to take control of what is essentially the most valuable skill in life, which is to be able to willfully think, feel, and behave in whatever way we need to succeed at living life on our own terms.

Because of that global, systematic failure at a proper education, most of us are set adrift in adulthood with no instructions on how to set our sails so that we take a course that delivers us where we want to go in life. As adults, we are now captains of our fate and must learn to set our own sails.

This is How You Form a New Habit - Where Our Habits Come From!

Habits fill your basic human need to conserve energy and ease effort necessary to survive, so that you can survive more effectively by maintaining higher energy reserves.

Habits are automatically formed when an action you take meets or exceeds your basic human need, such as when eating a cookie distracts you from a sudden craving.

Simultaneously, your brain releases a motivating chemical called Dopamine into your central nervous system to compel you to use that method the next time the need arises.

By repeating the action thus dictated by your brain, you initiate (and eventually lock in) a neurochemical feedback loop that makes sticking with the repetitive behavior easier. 

Dopamine Is Your Friend and Enemy During Intentional Habit Formation.

Your brain's reward system makes Dopamine your natural taskmaster in strengthening any habit it believes will relieve its discomfort over not having a human need met in the moment. 

Your brain will easily ignore the most logical, practical answer to solve its state of craving in favor of a solution that merely distracts it momentarily with a fleeting sensation of pleasure.

For example, the earlier mention of reaching for cookies when feeling a need for something tasty certainly distracts your brain from the immediate craving.

What's more, your brain will irrationally accept that sugary experience as a solution and casually make it into a long-term, unhealthy habit.

On the other hand, if you happen to reach for an apple and the same process activates, your brain will chemically induce you to consider that option next time. 

"When we're in pain, our brain automatically looks for a way out of it. And if we find a way out of it, we get rewarded and motivated to do it again. If we if we take advantage of that process, then forming New Habits is easy and rewarding." ---T. Lavon Lawrence, Creating Your Best Self Podcast

Unhealthy Habits vs Healthy Habits - Only One Actually Works

The healthy satisfaction and the unhealthy satisfaction can both enable a habit through repetition, only the former (unhealthy habit) causes damage while the latter (healthy habit) satisfies your brain and body.

The difference being that unhealthy eating habits cause unhealthy physical and mental results while healthy choices do a much better job in satisfying real nutritional requirements that produce more energy for survival.

How You Picked Up The Habits You Want to Change!

When we are young toddlers, elementary, high-school, and college students, our habits are dictated to us by those in authority - parents, siblings, relatives, friends, local culture - and we had little say in the matter.

Entering adulthood, most people stay locked into the same habit patterns all their lives. For those of us who don't want to settle for that, staying stuck in the same old routines is completely unacceptable.

Fortunately, there has never been an easier time to break bad habits and form new ones that can bring you the life experience you really want, automatically.

Why You Should Intentionally, Systematically Form Good Daily Habits!

We can only not only break those bad habits you're talking about, but we can form the good ones. And we can do it at the same time. And it's the same exact process." ---T. Lavon Lawrence, Creating Your Best Self Podcast

Every habit you build on purpose can have an immediate, positive impact on the direction you're headed in each major area of life. At Creating Your Best Self Podcast, we refer to these four major areas as 'The Four Pillars of Success.'

Impacts of New Habits on your Physical Health

A few simple habits can make you more physically fit, providing stronger physical health that actually helps you through adulthood into old age with less risk of physical deterioration and cognitive decline. Science has shown that improving physical health as you grow older results in increased quality of life in defiance of natural age-related deterioration.

How Forming New Habits Leads to Better Mental Health

When you decide to make a personal discipline of consciously designing and installing personal habits, you take the first step on the road to genuine human freedom and success.

Through intentional habits, you can train your your thoughts, emotions, consistent behaviors, and even your Inner Voice to work automatically at crafting the life you desire. With just the right approach, you can artistically conduct your feelings with growing mastery so that they work for you, letting you enjoy the kinds of daily emotional experiences that bring satisfaction, happiness, and contentment.

Use New Habits to Boost Your Financial Results

The entire global economy hinges on the power of human habit. Habit creates wealth as well as destroys it, making wealthy people and organizations of those who consistently behave with money in a certain way while dragging others with lousy money habits into the gutter of ruin and poverty. Your personal economy is similarly reliant on personal habits and will grow and shrink according to the consistent actions you take with income or revenue.

Every financial advisor, wealth expert, and money guru worth their salt will suggest a certain set of habits necessary to achieve higher levels of financial success. These habits tend to be applicable in every modern society and work for nearly anyone who puts them in their arsenal of predicable behaviors.

Imagine how much easier your financial results would rise should you make a pleasurable breeze of spending less than you earn! If you want to reach higher financial levels, you will have to do it through the power of new habits.

New Habits are Essential for Healthier Relationships

Whether romantic, platonic, business, or casually social, our relationships are made stronger or weaker by the habits we demonstrate toward others both in and out of their presence.

Not only must you reach for the right habits to form a healthy, ideal relationship with yourself, you need to have the same level of serious intentionality in your connection with other people.

Whatever experience you want to enjoy in all your relationships, you will need to audit, adjust, perhaps even remove certain unhealthy personal tendencies while replacing them with characteristics that reasonable people find positive and preferrable.

Is Forming New Habits Worth the Effort?

"We have these bad habits, it's better, it's easier to replace that bad habit with a good one. And at is very core. You know, habit is just, you know, it's just it's just your behavior running on autopilot." ---David N. Johnson, Creating Your Best Self Podcast

Depending on the habit and its capacity to add value to your daily life, even a year's hard effort can be a small price to pay to all the benefits available. For example, would you be willing to try 254 times to acquire a habit that would revolutionize and boost your financial, physical, mental, and social experience to levels you dream about?

Would you spend 66 days learning a skill that would double your income in under a year? That's certainly possible.

What about adopting just one or two simple habits that would make your relationship into a dream come true? Surely that's worth a measly two-month effort.

The point is habits are a force multiplier - a way that a regular human being can access a superpower used by the most successful people in the world to get extraordinary results. One or two small habits can change your destiny and completely elevate your life experience.

How Long Does it Take to Build a New Habit?

According to James Clear, a world-renowned Habit Expert, an intentionally formed habit can take between 60 and 254 days with a 66-day bar as the average, according to numerous scientific research studies.

Forming New Habits in MINUTES a Day rather than Hours!

In this Good Morning America Interview, James Clear discusses how you can build new habits intentionally in as little as two minutes a day. 

EDIT: In this episode, I (David N Johnson) mentioned First Thinking and Second Thinking, I should have used the term Second ORDER Thinking. A small error on my part but I wanted to make sure that I corrected my mistake. I even wrote a post explaining it in detail HERE.