40% of our day is doing things without even thinking and that makes it hard to change habits.
With a new year, new resolutions are made yet by the end of January, those diet plans have slowly been forgotten about, those gym visits less frequent.
The secret is to create new habits and it takes a few things in order to make them successful.
Firstly, as your intentional mind can easily fall into habit, you need to derail the existing habits and create a window of opportunity to act on new intentions. Say for losing weight, you can swap out where the unhealthy food is kept in the fridge with healthy food as your autopilot takes you there.
Secondly, as new habits can take a while to form (anything from 15 days to over 200 days!)it’s all about repetition. Doing things over and over again. Doing things over and over again.
Finally, form new, stable context cues. Like when you come home and put your keys in the same place do something after so you are adding something to an existing habit.
Whilst habits are hard to change, it’s easier to form a new one than reverse an old one.
Plus we feel much better with ourselves when we achieve positive change.
Good luck with those resolutions and hope you are sticking to them!