22. Hacking Your Way To New Habits

how long does it take to build new habits? This is a question for debate really. They say it takes about 21 days to create a new habit, but it's a bit weird, isn't it? We seem to think that takes longer to build bad habits. And it doesn't take as long to form new habits because it doesn't matter how hard we try. It always seems to take longer to form a new habit. than it does to create a bad habit. But I think for me anyway, habits are created subconsciously. What I mean by that is we don't really think about the bad habit. We just do it. We do something that makes us feel good. And then that kind of formed into a habit in the background. So maybe that's why bad habits seem to be easier to create because there's no resistance there. In creating it.

It's true. I guess we should answer that question. How long does it take to build a new habit? Well, that really depends on your mindset and how big of a change it is that you're trying to make to what it is you're actually doing at the moment. And the thing is if you're trying to change something drastic, such as you're going to stop eating takeaways right now, or you're just going to give up and quit smoking or something like that. It may take a lot longer because those things are not just something that can be a quick fix, because there's all sorts of different factors involved. For example, if we're talking about quitting smoking, we may need to take into account things such as nicotine addiction. So it all depends really on how you feel about what it is you're doing, how big of a change you're trying to make and what it is you're trying to change. Another example could be if your habit is eating a big bowl of ice cream at night and you switch to something like a low sugar alternative or maybe something like frozen yoghurt is probably not going to take you very long to replace that habit because you're replacing it with something that's just as good so it feels the same habit doesn't really feel so different. And you haven't drastically changed it. But if you're giving up ice cream altogether, then it may take a little bit longer because it's kind of like cold turkey. And I personally believe that changing habits should be done gradually over time should start small. And I wouldn't recommend something just like white knuckling it and just doing it straight off the bat because that can lead to feelings of failure.

okay, let's talk about some simple hacks to build some new habits. Now, as we've discussed, creating new habits is never going to be a walk in the park. So what we've done is we've put together seven simple hacks that will make it a little bit easier for you to form new habits because no one wants this to be hard, right? If it's too difficult, if it's too hard, then we will probably give up really easily. So let's get into that list right now. And the first one that we've got for you is to schedule your new habit and put it on a to do list. Now I'm not the greatest with lists. So I'm going to leave this up to shell to talk about this one because she loves her lists.

I do have my list and it's not because I'm crazy organised is because if it's not written down, I will absolutely Forget it the moment I walk away. So having a to do list for me is just so essential, and having a calendar as well that I can check back in on I find really really useful especially with things like dates, I definitely no hope of remembering a date if it's not in in the calendar. I'll definitely double booked myself. But you can just simple things if you're wanting to do a new daily activity say for example, you want to exercise every day. If you set out a time in advance in your calendar to do that, it's gonna make it easier for you to accomplish it every day. Because you're not then every single day trying to squeeze in that time if you pre planned that time, and it's easy to do. You've got that reminder in your calendar straight away. So it just makes the whole thing bit more simple. And it depends on how you feel about notifications. Things like reminders on your phones can be really helpful as well. Personally, I don't tend to do that because I struggle with notifications on my phone, but that's definitely a valid option for some people as well.

So the next one is to make it public and make yourself accountable. So let your friends and family members know what it is you're trying to establish what habit you're trying to create. And they can call you out on it if you don't stick to it. And it will also help you stay on track and stay on plan. Now we talked about something similar in an episode before where we discussed an accountability partner. Now I know for a simple fact that if I was on my own doing this podcast, I would come up with so many excuses all sorts of reasons and excuses of why I could not record an episode this week because it was too hard. But because I've got shell she's my accountability partner on the podcast. It helps me stay on track because that one person that you're thinking about that you don't want to let down, click on it makes you feel better as well to have that person to put up and discuss things with so when me and Charlotte talking. So when we're talking shall might say to me, Oh, well, we might not have time to do it. Today. But why don't we schedule it on this day or that day? And I'm like, oh, okay, so we're doing it.

be perfect. It's harder to do that on your own Exactly. And it becomes so much harder when you're just on your own. So another way that you can also use this technique is to be publicly accountable. So maybe you need to make your new habit public. So you could even go as far as sharing it on Facebook or Instagram or places like that. And I know we discussed about social media and the effects of social media a few episodes ago, but it is to do with trying to keep up a new habit. So maybe you need some inspiration from people, people can keep you going or maybe just knowing that others are there supporting you is enough to keep you doing it because you don't want to look or feel like a failure. And it just kind of keeps you from thinking that you can't do it. Because you've got people watching you and egging you on and giving you that little bit of dopamine and saying things like you can do it and you can do it. And all of that motivates us to carry on and continue to build that new habit

so the third point is to piggyback on a habit that you already have. This is also known as habit stacking, and it just makes things flow a bit better and easier to remember. So the concept of this is that there are lots of habits that you will already have ingrained in your life. So we've discussed a few of them before things like brushing your teeth every morning, maybe you go downstairs, make yourself a cup of tea. Those are all daily habits that you have. So if you can tack a new habit onto that, and it makes it easier for you to remember it say for example you wanted to do, there's like a squat challenge that you can do isn't there where you do 100 squats a day for 30 days. So you wanted to do something like that? Well, you could start it when you're brushing your teeth. And that's your trigger every day to remind you I'm brushing my teeth, therefore I should do I squat. Doesn't have to be that obviously that's an example I've personally never tried but you get in the gym. So it's about as soon as you start one habit. Tacking another habit onto that. Do the two of them combined. So one prompts the other. Yes. So what

you're saying now is creating a trigger as well. And like we discussed in the last episode, cravings can be formed by a trigger and we talked about the pizza as well. And we're always talking about junk food on the podcast because yes, we love food. So the trigger is created. Yeah, so I'm brushing my teeth. There's the trigger. Oh, I need to do my squats, for example. And the reason that we're talking about stacking those habits together, is because you can do all those things. All in one go. Which means you have more time and it just makes you feel like you're actually able to get stuff done. Okay, the next one we've got for you is to make slip ups constantly and I'm a big believer in the

so here's a fun idea. So get a jar and put it in the kitchen or wherever it is you want it to go. And each time you slip back into that old habit then at that point, it's time to start putting some money into the jar. So for example, let's say you slip up you would then put say five pound in the jar and every time you slip up you put more money in the jar. Now losing money will help you to quickly understand that you've slipped back into bad habits, and it'll keep prompting you as well. And we've talked about this so many times in the podcast, and I've just said it a minute ago as well. But there is nothing wrong with not being perfect and slipping up but this is just about having a visual representation of how many times you've slipped up and it will help motivate you and push you forward. The bonus is you can do great things with the money such as give it to charity, maybe you've got a charity in mind that you really want to support that you can give them money to. So you're doing something good whilst building a new hobby. Or you could go and spend that money on yourself or buy something for a loved one or something like that. Obviously, the goal here is to get those slip ups as less common as

possible. So the next point is something we've touched on before but it's important enough to give it its own bullet point, which is to find a partner and accountability partner and help each other along. So if you want to find out more about that go to Episode 16 where we talk about it in a lot more detail. But the basic gist is you want to find somebody with the same or a similar goal and you encourage each other you motivate each other you provide accountability for when each other is struggling feeling low or not wanting to keep up with the goal. It makes it much harder to skip out if you've got somebody to answer to so just a

quick example of this that I'm going to use today is shall is currently preparing herself to go to a friend's wedding and we didn't have time on Monday to record our usual normal episode. And we both could have just gone. Oh, you know what, leave it for this week and let's just leave it. But as we both committed to doing a weekly episode, and we're both involved, it means that we actually have to be accountable to each other and it's hard to give up when you're accountable. I would feel absolutely awful if I just gave up and said you know, I'm not doing it this week, and then Sunday would come and I'd be sat there thinking of it's my fault. We haven't got an episode out this week. So using an accountability partner really helps and we've really pushed ourselves and this is where we are trying to create new habits for ourselves as well because being accountable is something that works. I mean, we're on episode 22. When I said this the other week, I never thought we'd get there. Like I never thought we'd be able to keep this commitment for this long, but through rain or shine, or whatever has happened to us and the things that have been going on that are going on in our lives. We've still made time to sit down and record an episode each week, which is what we're doing right now. And it also ties in really nicely with the next thing which is to make your habit a group challenge so maybe you could form a group which is even better because then you have more motivation. Having more than one person in the group can really motivate you because people see things from different perspectives. And when two of you are feeling down, then you've got that third person that can jump in and go, Oh, I've got this great idea. Let's do this. So what I would do is if you've got family and friends who have got the same goals of you, then use that to your advantage. Maybe you want to set up a weight loss group, or maybe there's habits that you want to change and you've got friends that would like to create and make those new habits to make a group challenge with if you don't have anyone that you can create a group challenge with and you don't have people around you that have got similar goals. Then you can do this online, you can find groups online, find support online, and you can still challenge each other to stick to a new habit for the next

30 days. So the final point that we've got for you to make a new habit and stick to it is creative routine around it. So examples of this are things like a bedtime routine, a cleaning routine, a morning routine. So these are things that ideally you're planning in advance. You can sit down with a pen and paper if you want to make it a bit more formal. If you want to but let's take for example, the bedtime routine. When you get to the end of the day. It's a lot harder to make decisions. You've been making decisions all day. It's harder to think about what you want to eat for dinner. What you're going to do that evening whether you're just going to watch TV, what time you're going to go to bed, but by cutting out that decision making a making it into a routine, then it frees your mind up and takes that stress over making decisions at the end of the day away. So for example, if you do something like meal planning, then that will help you in advance figure out what meals you need to eat what food you need to have in advance. If you know that every night, you're going to curl up to bed at a certain time. Brush your teeth, wash your face, whatever and then go to bed maybe do something like a meditation and then go to bed. It makes it easier to not just stay awake late watching TV because you know it's got to that time that you said you would turn the TV off and come upstairs to bed just makes it easy to stick to you're not having to make decisions on that. Great. So that's all we've got time for this week. We'll just leave you with our little kicker. We've been teasing it for a week now. But our little kicker is we are going to start a habit challenge. So what we would like you to do is pick a habit the habit can be of your choosing and stick to it for 100 days. And what we've done is we've created a little habit tracker guide to help you with that. So if you go to the show notes, you can download it so it's just a simple document with 100 spaces to tick. So you write your habit at the top when you're going to start what day you're gonna finish it and then every day when you've done your habit you put a tick in a tick box. So I thought it would be really good as well. Sparky, if if you and I also do this challenge and set up a habit of Alright, so I'm going to put you on the spot a new a new what have you gonna do?

Okay, so for me, I am going to leave the house every single day and do something like a walk or a walk. I want to get into the mindset. Basically, I'm gonna have it stack a little bit so I want to actually leave the house more, but I actually want to walk as well. So what I might do is I might take some of these things that we've suggested, so I'm not going to make it a group challenge because obviously this is just going to come down to me. But what I will do is I will make it public because I'm saying it on this podcast, which obviously holds me accountable. And I'm also going to remind myself by using my smartwatch and I'm going to try and hit 1000 steps a day. Now I know like that's not a lot really compared to what I was doing a few years ago. But I don't want to stretch myself too far. I think around 5000 to 8000 steps would be a good first step for me too. For me to start off with so getting out getting some sunshine my main goal really is just to get out and get sunshine, but I'm going to have it stack those together, leaving the house getting more sunshine and trying to get my steps up and go for a walk. So that's what I'm going to be doing. How about you shall

Okay, so mine initially sounds easy, but it's something that I really struggle with and that is to drink two litres of water a day. So I noticed when I was on maternity. My lips didn't get chopped. I got a lot less headaches. My skin didn't feel as dry. And I realised when it all came back when I started working again it's because I don't really drink at work. I can you can easily be three four o'clock before I have my first way when I've been at work all day. And it's it's pretty tea coloured when I do go sorry if that's an option. So I know that I'm getting myself dehydrated, and that's what's causing all the symptoms. So, and it's silly really isn't it because it you know sounds so difficult to drink two litres of water a day but if you if you go for a night out how many drinks would you have a night out and that doesn't seem difficult. So exactly. I know it's just something that I need to be more proactive and doing so my my part of last week so removing the friction was to get myself a nice new water bottle. So that valgum sort of tasting a bit funky you know if you put like stuff other than water in it Yeah, like juice or something. You just got a taste, haven't you? So I've got a nice new ones didn't taste of anything not going to contaminate it's just going to have water in and I'm going to start my 100 days from today.

Perfect. I think that's amazing. I like the fact that you use last week's preparation to kind of combine it with this week. That was that was that was a really good thing. So hopefully everybody else has got their preparation set up their environment. And he's now on their way to starting their new habit. Use these tips like we said we got we gave you seven tips to hack your way to forming a new habit. Use those use the 100 Day Challenge ticket. It's very very simple. All you got to do is just ticket when you've done your new habit. There's not too much involved in doing it. And let's see how you get on. Next week we will be discussing more about habits because there's so much talk about habits. We'll be talking about the power of motivation and whether it works or not. And we'll be back as usual. With another live okay. That's everything this week, guys. But if you want to carry on with the conversation, join us over on our social media platforms. We're on all the major channels and our handle is at a dopamine kick. We'd also be super grateful if you could leave us a review on the podcast wherever you're listening, because it helps us to grow our audience and help more people.