The Power Of Focusing On One Habit At A Time

[Christian]

Hey, self actualizers. I want to talk about habits and how to build habits because it is one of the most important aspects of personal development. Setting up quality habits will mean the difference between a life of suffering and happiness so It's very important that you listen carefully. 

I have been on this PD journey for close to 3 years now and I have had a lot of trouble making habits. One of the reasons why is because I've focused too much on building many habits at once. Just recently, I was trying to go to the gym, eat healthy, overcome approach anxiety and meditate. All great things, but NOT when you do them all at once. 

My advice to you is please make sure that you ONLY focus on one habit at a time. Not two, one. Building new habits is difficult and do not overestimate your will-power. It is a finite and precious ressource. I did not fully get that so here I am back to square one with no habits installed, I failed miserably because I was trying to do too much too soon. 

Don't be like me, be smart and patient when it comes to building habits and I gurantee you will have more success  

 

[Erlend K]

I think it depends on how motivated you are to change. If you want to improve for some abstract, theorethical reason like "improving is good" or "This will improve my life many years from now", its hard to keep motivation high enough to implement stuff quicly. I think the key is to make motivation as concrete as possible and set up a motivation-effort-reward feedback loop. At least that was the case for me. 

Personaly I started an insanely intensive, effective and fun self-development project a year ago, after learning about research showing that the biggest influencer of happiness is the quality and authenticity of our social relationships. At the time I was anxious and unhappy had no direction in life, and felt dissatisfied with my relationships. Right there and then I set improving my relationships as my main goal and priority in life,  and after just weeks I stared to feel significant inprovments in my mood and decreased neuroticism. I quickly became extremely passionate, almost obsessed,  with this project, and would straight up implement any habits I could think of that would aid it. I got very pragmatic about my goal, would research a lot and implement everything I discovered.

The more I built my lifestyle around my project of mastering relationships the happier I felt, making me even more motivated to up the project, wich would further increase my happiness. This positive feedback loop alowed me to quickly and enthusiasticly implement new habbits with little or no use of will power. 

All day long I would on and off think about smal things I could do to improve this or that relationship in subtle ways. I would work hard trying to think of ways to help this person or make that person feel good. Eventualy lots of my spontanious thought loops would be planning the comming day/week like: "If I spend the next few houres first eating a healthy meal, going for a jog, write in my gratitude journal and then meditate, I will be in a better mood the rest of the day. This will make me more friendly and positive when I meet my friend later. This will be good for our relationship" (Or often more subtle actions I could take. I would just constantly be on the lookout for them) . Then I would just act with no resistance, as I percieved the actions not as isolated "habits", but as integrated parts of a deeply meaningful project that I oriented my whole life around.

Within a year I had improved my life in every significant way. I went from feeling anxious, unhappy, having strugling relationships and little hope and enthusiasm about life to the opposite. I love and enjoy my life more than ever before now!

I don't know if my experience is replicable tho, or if I was just extremly lucky to get into this highly motivated roll. When I find the time I will try to write more in-depth about the changes I made and how I did it. 

Edited August 5, 2017 by Erlend K

[Spiral]

@Christian The better safe than sorry approach. Three weeks per habit is good for me. Two weeks of: I don't want to..... and one to make it stick.