Look Back to Develop a New Habit.
If you are looking to add a new habit to your daily routine, it is worth considering how you adopted your current habits and whether you can use the same skills to incorporate a different habit or behavior into your daily routine. …
Doug Moore and Spencer Greenberg of ClearerThinking.org recently conducted a study that asked nearly 500 people to use one of 23 common habit-forming methods. Some people, for example, rewarded themselves after doing their habit, while others used motivational phrases or mantras.
When the study was completed, one method emerged: Habit Reflection. As Moore and Greenberg explain at Fast Company :
This quick and easy method helped participants practice their habits an average of 0.7 times per week more than others, a 140% improvement over the second most effective method. In addition, those who used the habit mirroring technique reported greater satisfaction with their progress towards their habit formation goals than any other group in the study.
What is Habit Reflection? This is exactly what it sounds like: it takes time to reflect on how you used to introduce a positive habit into your life.
Write down everything you learned from this past situation about how to successfully form new habits, or any tactics you used to make this change that can be applied to your new habit.
Once you understand how you have successfully implemented habits in the past, you can use the same tools and tactics to build whatever habit you would like to implement right now.
Maybe you are the kind of person who needs to combine their habits, in the style of James Clear. Maybe the daily mantra is working for you. You may need to use the method of BJ Fogg’s “Swarm of Fours” and maintain your habit with multiple behaviors at the same time.
Interestingly, in Moore and Greenberg’s study, participants who chose their habit-forming strategy without first doing habit reflection were not as successful as participants who went through the habit reflexion process.
Some of the study participants were randomly assigned to habit support methods; others chose theirs. Participants who were randomly assigned to their methods performed just as well as those who chose their own — and study participants were better off using Reflection of Habit than making their own choices.
In other words: you cannot choose a technique because it sounds good, or because it sounds the way you would, or because you think it might have worked in the past. You must go through the habit reflexion process and be honest with yourself about your behavior in order to successfully implement a new behavior change.
So before you start scheduling, adding and optimizing your habits for 2020, take some time to reflect on how your current habits fell into place, what happened to the habits you tried and gave up, and what you really need to do to reinforce your new habits. …
Then use what you’ve learned to take turns building new habits.