Design Your Life by Designing Your Habits

Sometimes it's obvious when a habit is good or bad for us such as watching TV all day. Other times we have habits that seem okay or tolerable. We justify those habits because we get some enjoyment from them or because we don’t want to put in the effort to change them and they don’t seem that bad anyway. “Good” and “bad” habits aren’t really good or bad. They are habits that are either productive or unproductive to our goals and the type of person we want to be. Unproductive habits are different from, what are commonly seen as, unproductive activities.

Productive habits help you achieve your goals or help you become the person who you want to be. Unproductive habits either keep you in the same place, hold you back from progress, or make progress more difficult such as reinforcing a negative mindset. Having productive habits doesn’t mean working all of the time. Relaxing activities such as watching a movie could be seen as unproductive, however, when they are controlled, relaxing activities help a person recharge, have fun, improve their mindset so that they can be productive when it’s time to work towards achieving a goal.

Habits, like any structure are meant to support and enable achieving a goal or producing an outcome. Without a goal or outcome to produce or maintain, habits aren’t required. Habits can be used to:

1) Produce or maintain an outcome.

2) Improve a skill to a certain level.

3) Indulge in something unproductive.

What productive habits do you have that:

1) Cultivate or reinforce a positive mindset or empowering beliefs?

2) Result in feeling fulfilled and confident?

3) Result in a healthy body, having energy, and feeling vital?

4) Result in having enough money or financially comfortable?

5) Result in strengthening and maintaining relationships with yourself or with others?

6) Helping you produce results and make progress towards your goals?

What unproductive habits do you have that:

1) Cultivate or reinforce a negative mindset or limiting beliefs such as not being capable?

2) Result in feeling dissatisfaction, guilt, disappointment, sadness, or anger?

3) Result in an unhealthy body, having less energy, and feeling tired?

4) Result in not having enough money or barely having enough money?

5) Result in damaging relationships with yourself or with others?

6) Keep you stuck in the same spot instead of helping you make progress?

Since we already have established habits, it can be challenging to break unproductive habits and form productive ones. While there are techniques that may make this a bit easier, in the end, it comes down to consistent repetition of the new activity that you want to become a habit. It requires commitment to a different future and making a firm choice to go in that direction because it’s very important to you. Quitting smoking is easy when the person is truly committed and difficult when part of them wants to keep smoking. Habits are about repetition until you go from putting conscious effort into doing it, to doing the activity automatically or routinely without resistance. As you form the new habit, you will have thoughts about going back to the old habit and you will need to keep choosing the new habit that you are forming. If you slip up, get back to the new habit as soon as you can. No one is perfect so accept that you are human and keep doing your best.