ESYB2 107 - Combining Habits You Like with New Ones You Want
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[00:00:00] I want to share a really nifty and useful hack for forming new habits and for decreasing the amount of discipline needed to start working towards a new habit. And this is to first identify habits that you already love. Let's say you love going for an evening walk with your family or significant other or with your dog or just by yourself.

Let's say you like that habit. And let's say that the habit that you want to build is after dinner, you want to clean the dishes because you know, they, it's comfortable to go plop on the couch or just go like, it's comfortable and it's tempting. Everybody I think has been there where you're a little tired and you ate and all, you know, you're a little sleepy and right?

So you don't want to wash the dishes, but you know that they're going to be gross if you leave them overnight. I think everybody deals with that. So. You want to form a habit of cleaning the dishes right after you [00:01:00] eat. At first, it's a hard habit, because you're already tired, it's dinner time, you're kind of late in your day.

And so, it's not the best time to form new habits that are physically demanding. But okay, what we can do, see this is the hack here, is we can combine habits we like with habits that we want to build. For example, so like if we like going outside, okay. We can start getting ready to go outside. As we get up, okay, you see we already interrupted the pattern of sitting down on the couch or continuing to sit down in our chair.

So we got up to change our clothes. And right there we can just inject. Take one minute to just rinse off and wash the dishes. And then go on the walk. Easy, right? So that way, we string patterns together of ones we already like, and we're just basically combining habits that [00:02:00] we want to add. So we're just making things a little bit more, we're managing it to make it a little bit easier to flow from one task to the next based on the habits that we already have.

So in your case, you might think of what do I already like doing? What are the habits I already like? And basically trying to string the behaviors that you want to add in a nice, easy way so that it's natural. Because to go from, I'm lazy right now, I just ate too much and I don't want to move, to washing dishes is a big step.

But if you've begun a habit that you like already, like going out for a walk, That washing of the dishes is not as big of a step, and you suddenly found some energy because, again, you're about to do something you like, so a little bit of dopamine and adrenaline is released, and you have a little more energy.

You just found just enough of the right energy [00:03:00] to go and take a couple of minutes to wash the dishes, and then pretty soon, hopefully, again, different people have different speeds for building habits, but hopefully soon, when you eat, It will just be a natural thing. Oh, washing dishes? Walk. And there's no force in yourself.

Just because of your stringing and bracketing habits together in a natural, manageable way that doesn't require too much discipline. Or a lot less discipline than otherwise you would have had to give it.

