Name: Badass Habits
Rating: 4.4 (317 reviews)
Author: Jen Sincero

What’s in it for me? A snappy guide to updating your life.

From chronic lateness to compulsive impulse shopping, we all have habits we’d rather leave behind. Unfortunately, breaking old patterns and replacing them with better ones isn’t always as easy as it seems.

But don’t despair! These blinks will help you chart a new way forward. First, you’ll learn how unconscious biases, fears, and desires can leave you locked in established routines. Then you’ll get simple, straightforward advice on how to disrupt these entrenched habits and cultivate a new, more positive groove.

In these blinks, you’ll find out

what makes it easy to adopt a puppy;
how a manicure can fix bad habits; and
why saying no is the key to success.

To change your habits, change who you are.

Meet Alice. At 30 years old, she realized she was in a toxic relationship. Not with a parent or a partner, but with sugar. Every time Alice indulged in sweets, she’d get terrible breakouts, worry about weight gain, and generally just feel awful.

Something had to change. So she stopped buying and binging on snacks, sought advice from dietitians, and even watched documentaries demonizing sucrose.

These steps helped, but it always felt like she was one bad day away from slipping back into her old sugary ways. In the end, Alice had to change not just her actions but her whole identity. She had to become a person who simply didn’t eat sugar.

The key message here is: To change your habits, change who you are.

To put it simply, a habit is a routine, action, or behavior you engage in over and over again. Essentially, it’s what you do when running on autopilot. Habits can be positive patterns, like always putting on your seatbelt when driving, or destructive ones, like constantly misplacing keys, jewelry, or other valuables.

Habits work by connecting a trigger to a response, then connecting that response to a reward. Consider a habit like daily exercise. The trigger could be seeing your gym on the way home from work. The response would then be stopping in for 40 minutes of cardio. The rewards? The rush of endorphins and a feeling of accomplishment. Importantly, the more often you follow this sequence, the more automatic and ingrained it becomes.

Of course, you probably aren’t aware that the sequence is taking place; if you’re like most people, many of your habits are completely unconscious. So the first step in making any change to your routines is to identify them. To do that, reflect on your actions, as well as the thoughts and feelings associated with them. For someone like Alice, this meant looking at when sugar binges happen. Did stress trigger them? What reward did they offer?

Once you become aware of the sequences behind your habits, you can consciously alter them. This requires redefining your identity to fit the new habits you want. So Alice needed to stop seeing herself as a sugar-addicted ball of stress and instead cultivate an identity as a healthy, happy eater. Once you truly see yourself as a different person, your unconscious sequences will fall in line more easily. We’ll look at one way to establish an identity in the next blink.

Strong boundaries are the foundation for strong habits.

Let’s say that you’re fed up with starting the day in a sour mood. Rather than staying up late and waking up exhausted, you want to greet each morning with a smile and a full yoga session. You’re determined to become a morning person.

But then the world gets in the way. First, your boss asks you to come in early for an unimportant meeting. Then your friends keep you out all night bar hopping. By the time dawn rolls around, you’re more worn out and washed up than ever before. So much for being a morning person.

New habits stick when they align with your true desires.

Imagine you get a call from a friend. She’s got big news, she says: her dog just had a surprise litter of puppies! So of course you drop everything to meet the new pups. As you watch the adorable fur balls play, she asks if you’d like to adopt one.

Now, on one hand, your logical brain knows a pet is a big responsibility. You’ll have to walk it and feed it and take it to the vet. You’re already busy, so that’s a big effort. But, on the other hand, that tiny puppy is so cute.

Establish your new habit with 21 days of concentrated effort.

Okay, you know where habits come from and how they connect to your true desires. And you’ve probably already selected which habit you’re ready to commit to as your goal. Now, it’s time to make this dream a reality.

How long should that take – a month? A year? How about 21 days. While it’s true that everyone is different and some habits are picked up more easily than others, about three weeks is a good rule of thumb. If you can keep to your new routine for this length of time, there’s a good chance it’ll become second nature.

The goal of building good habits is to be the best version of yourself.

Flip through a few old photo albums or scroll back through your social media feed. What do you see? Sure, there’ll be some high points. Maybe pictures of you winning an award, celebrating a graduation, or just looking really good before a night out.

But there are probably some other types of moments in there as well; snapshots of you goofing off, for example, looking a bit too tipsy, or making fashion choices you’d like to forget. Don’t hit delete on those awkward moments. They’re part of you – and you should accept them, not erase them.

Kernaussagen in Badass Habits