A guide to building strong habits that don’t just last a couple of weeks

• habits
• mindset
• fitness
• goals
• toptips

Now that gyms (and dare I say it life) are beginning to open up, do you want to build long-term behaviours that will improve your health and happiness?

Of course, you do! 

Forward progress is a big part of what makes (and keeps) us humans happy. 

 

In this article, we’re giving you some clear strategies to allow you to seamlessly input healthy habits into your lifestyle, whether that’s with training, nutrition or whatever.

 

Habits have a pretty clear operating system that looks something like this:

 

1. We get a cue. 

This acts as a reminder for us to perform a certain behaviour. For example, when we go to the cinema, we see and smell popcorn. Which, without a doubt, will make us want popcorn.

 

       2. We then act out the behaviour. 

This is the routine that follows the trigger or cue- We buy the popcorn. Woop, popcorn.

 

       3.We get a reward.  

In this example, we eat popcorn and soak up the experience of the cinema in general. Fun times! This reward strengthens the behaviour and makes it more likely we’ll choose to act it out again. Repeat steps 1, 2 and 3 enough times, and whammy, you have a habit on your hands! Because this loop helps to build automatic behaviours that we just don’t have to think about, which in turns makes our lives a bunch easier. 

 

Think about typing out an article on a keyboard for example (not sure why that springs to mind). If you had to consciously remember and then locate every single letter on the keyboard as you were typing away… the whole process would take a hell of a lot longer to perform than it does. Luckily, the more we practice typing and solidify this behaviour as something that comes naturally to us, the less we have to think about it – win. With this theory in mind, let’s use a health-based behaviour (eating an apple) as an example of building a positive habit into your lifestyle… 

Step 1- The cue.

 

A few key rules for cues is that they need to:

• Stand out.
• Be attractive and make you want to follow through with the behaviour.
• Ultimately, make the behaviour easy to perform.

 

Examples of how to do this:

• Make cues really obvious. Buy apples, your favourite kind. Put them everywhere and make sure they’re in your eye line. 
• Don’t try and eat 100 apples (this is unrealistic and unnecessary). Start small with one apple per day. Ask yourself; what time will you want to eat the apple? What are you generally doing at this time? Stick an apple there to remind you. 

 

(This also works well for removing a negative habit - want to stop doing something? Get it out of sight and out of mind).

Step 2- The routine.

 

Having noticed the various cues, hopefully, this will mean you’re much more likely to act out the routine of eating the apple - super job!

Step 3- The reward. 

 

This is an incredibly important part of the system as it confirms the behaviour as something positive that we’d benefit from doing again. The idea here is to make it immediately satisfying.

 

Examples of how to do this:

• Find a group of people that you can share your experiences with.
• Hire a coach to track your apple-eating consistency and to give you regular performance-based high fives.
• Make sure you only eat the most delicious apples. 
• Place an apple-eating spreadsheet on your fridge so you can tick each one off and stay satisfied with your progress.

 

So there you go, a 3 step process to improving your behaviours. Because it’s not enough to simply acknowledge what you want to do when it comes to improving your behaviours. It’s about making the process simpler and therefore more likely to occur.

 

Now we’re here, I’m sure you’ll realise this isn’t just about apples- you can switch out this example behaviour for a more specific one that is in line with your goals. But the point is the theory stays the same. Following the above steps, and building repeatable behaviours that simply become just a part of what you do… 

 

Is the best way to achieve and sustain life-long habits and results. 

I hope this helps!

 

Sam Pashley 

Instagram: @worlds.strongest.sam

The author of this article/blog/ is a qualified Level 3 Personal Trainer. Further detail regarding the author can be found via the website or social media handle listed above.

 

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