Do you know what the secret of professional guitarists is?
The answer is that they regularly annoy their family members with a guitar. Everyday!
Nobody can play like ‘Chit San Maung’ after picking up a guitar for like a week. It takes months or years to become an expert. We have to develop the habit of practicing guitar regularly. We have to play incessantly every day.
When we start doing something, most of us want to be perfect dreamers who set huge goals with a "go big" or "go home" policy. We want to play cover songs after starting guitar for 3 days. We used to imagine working out two hours a day without the habit of regularly hitting the gym.
👊 Have you noticed we are being "jacks of all trades, masters of none", without reaching the goal we wanted? It is because of our mindset, which says, “If you do your best from the beginning, do it. If not, don’t even try to do it.”
If you want to develop a habit, you need to tolerate your imperfections and say “I will keep doing it no matter how bad I am”. 📈
So today, we, Study Diary, will be sharing with you guys about habits, why the habits you want don't stick, how to fix this, and major factors of habit tracking so that you can be careful about what you do. Note that these will be very important skills in many parts of your life, starting with fixing your attitudes like “dallying.”.
Click here if you're interested🙌
Translation by @Blonded
Graphics by @Glory
The Nature of a Habit
Growing up, a habit generally divides into "Cue", "Routine" and "Reward". To become a habit, it mainly connects with the part of your brain that produces and controls rewards like dopamine. In James Clear’s book, “Atomic Habits”, which is popular among Burmese readers, the becoming of a habit is described like this:
1. Cue (prompt to Initiate ) 🛎
Any habit starts with the “cue,” which rings your will to do it. This “Cue” may come from your subconscious, or it may be caused by something outside.
2. Craving (a powerful desire) 💭
Craving is a feeling of wanting something caused by the “Cue”. Even if the Cues are the same, desire can be different according to people’s thoughts and emotions. (For example, the same cue “stress” in two people makes a religious one meditate and an alcoholic one get drunk.)
3. Response 🚶
Our action, which follows "craving,” is Response.
4. Reward ✨
Satisfaction, which results from our “response,” is Reward.
I’ll show you an example:
“I saw a water bottle advertisement on TV. Became thirsty. Drink water.”
Seeing an advertisement is a “Cue” which comes from outside of your subconsciousness, and becoming thirsty due to that Cue is a “Craving”. Drinking water is “Response” and relief from thirst after consuming water is “Reward”.
🔁These four together are called the “Habit Loop”. Because “Cue” awakens “Craving”, Craving urges you to prompt a “Response” and gets a “Reward” because of your “Response”. Therefore, every time the same thing happens, your brain will ring a Cue because he knows if you do these four again, you’ll get a Reward.
The Important Habit Triggers
To kill your negative behaviors, the most important first step is cueing. It’s because the other three steps of the “Habit Loop” won’t show up if there’s no Cue to awaken your willings.
Among these many different kinds of Cues (habit triggers), here are some of the crucial ones:
1. Time 🌇
After waking up in the morning, the continuous actions like cleansing your face, brushing your teeth, and making your bed are triggered by the sense of “I wake up in the morning”, not with your careful consideration before each action by consciousness.
2. Environment or Place 🏘
Let's say you usually take warm-up exercises such as muscle relaxation in one corner. Whenever you reach that corner, your body automatically gives you a cue to exercise without having to think too much. A similar event happens when you sit at your desk; you constantly want to study rather than sit anywhere else.
3. The event that takes place 👀
This one is like, when you hear a phone ring, your hands automatically reach for your phone. If something happens, the next action follows immediately.
4. State of your mind 😴
The state of your mind usually leads to bad habits. For example, biting your fingernails when you’re stressed, scrolling up and down on online shopping pages, and ordering some unnecessary items when you’re bored
5. Other People 👥
Take the story of “The Brother Parrots” as an example. The parrot who reached the hermits became polite, and the other one, who grew up with the thieves, became wild. Like in this tale, some of our habit triggers depend on other people. You know how to act when you’re near other people, either consciously or unconsciously. For example, ordering a drink when you go out with your friends without even knowing if you want it or not. You can adapt to this trigger by being around people who have the habits you want.
What to Hard-wired a habit?
Draw a specific plan for time and location. ⏰
For example, let’s say you want to develop a meditation habit before bed. Rather than thinking “I will meditate every night”, it’s better to have a more specific plan with time, location, and details like, “I will meditate every night exactly at ten o’clock in the altar room after brushing my teeth." People with more specific plans are more likely to stick to them.
Work with your potential habit (Habit Stacking). 📚
Have you ever experienced that if you buy a small item that you don’t actually need, that just makes it easier to buy another unnecessary item next time? When you start one thing and open a portal to do it next time, it is called the “Diderot Effect”.
What you just did is usually a trigger, a signal of what to do next. So when you’re developing a habit, try to do it together with a habit you already have instead of doing it on its own. To give you an example: “After lunch, I'm going to play guitar for half an hour".
Is there an identity island in your path? 👤
To some extent, whether or not a person has the desired good habits is determined by his personality. For example, if you want to save a lot of money but you are a “Spendthrift”, then you might only last for a while, even when you try to grow a habit. You work hard, and you waste it again in a rotational manner. In this case, you have to make identity-based changes in order to change your habit of wasting money without trying so hard to develop a habit. Or else, you’ll be like a guy who cleans the room once a week without fixing the attitude of making a mess.
Don’t be an overachiever. Start small. 🚫
Whatever you do, you need a bunch of motivation to make it happen if you have a big goal. Motivation is not something people have all the time. Getting up and working when you're motivated and doing nothing the rest of the time will put your goal far away. None of the habits you want to develop will come to fruition if you keep doing that.
So, please go on slowly and steadily without paying attention to toxic people or self-harming. For example, if you want to exercise regularly, stop doing half an hour a day, take a rest for two days, and do it again the next day. Instead, exercise regularly for at least one minute every day. The most important thing is regularity without a break. Once that one minute becomes a habit, it will be easier to increase it to 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, and more. Plus, you will stick to a habit you want.
Habit tracking to be aware of yourself
To pursue a habit and to do any kind of activity automatically without thinking too much, the connection of your brain neurons has to happen multiple times. Once it’s firmly rooted, it becomes your habit, and it is hard to build as well as to break.
🌿 In order to break or build any habit, the most important step is “awareness”. To gain this sort of awareness, you can use habit tracking. Out of all the habit tracking, I’ll share with you some methods called “James Clear’s Habit Scorecard”, that can be done easily.
“Habits Scorecard” 📝
First, write down the habits you have followed in your day and rate them as “excellent”, “average” or “poor”, respectively, on the side of the paper. Use "the Goal you want" as a ruler to measure how good or bad your habit is. If you want to reduce screen time, you have to note that looking at your phone on a chair after a meal is a bad habit.
This method is not for changing your behaviors immediately, but it will help you track your actions more carefully. After taking notes of what is good and bad, you can find your habit triggers and keep managing to replace them with better ways.
You can do habit tracking not only with the Scorecard but also with the apps, journals, and calendars. 📆
After reading today’s article, I hope you have a good understanding of the habits and get some good ideas to manage them.
Also, for the next week, Study Diary will share such an important skill about your life. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comment section. Trust the process and stay tuned, fountains!!!
コメント