Creating Habits That Stick – a Science-Backed Method That Works

When running a homestead (or even a home!), being bogged down by bad habits makes things more stressful, disorganized, and unhealthy.

By addressing your habits, and making a few small tweaks, you will have your natural human behaviour working for you, rather than against you.

No sense in beating around the bush, let’s break down how your brain works and get a system in place to get your good habits on autopilot and your bad habits invisible.

What makes a habit good or bad

Everyone responds differently to the same cue.

You’re feeling stressed so you eat a cookie, and then the whole bag. Or you pull out your phone and scroll social media. Or maybe you do a few jumping jacks and go for a run.

The way we each respond to the same cue is different.

Each has a positive instant effect – we feel better. But it’s the long-term impacts that determine if a habit is negative or positive.

The cue itself could mean nothing to someone, but be a trigger to another person. Like hanging out with friends.
For one person, that triggers a craving for a cigarette. For another, it’s just a fun night with friends.

Granted we probably all have the same cue habit of changing into comfy clothes when you come home from work. You’re my kinda people.

How you Identify with your habits

Your identity is basically made up of your habits. Your habits are who you are. Actions speak louder than words, right?

Your habits show if you’re a morning or night person, if you’re athletic, a musician, a writer, healthy.

You may be be a “professional” at these things but every time you do the actions you want to make into a habit, you are casting a vote to be that person.

The person you want to become had to BE who you are in that moment. You have to think about act like that person.

If you want to get in shape you don’t go saying, “I’m trying to get in shape.” No, you say, “I’m an in-shape person.”

If you had those two kinds of people in front of you, which one do you think is mindful of what they eat, works out every day, takes care of their body, and has confidence in their athletic abilities?

I bet you chose the second one. The two people are both working to get in shape but the one has aligned who they think they are, with the person they want to be.

That makes it so much easier for them to make the choices they need to make because they know what decision that kind of person would make.

If you have identified as someone who is lazy, binges on TV, is in debt, eats fast food far too often, can’t write a book, yadda, yadda, yadda, then you won’t do anything but those things.

You’ll always fall back into those roles and habits because that’s what is easy. It’s what your subconscious mind knows. In order for your habits to succeed, align your identity with the person you want to be.

Why habits fail – how the brain works

Habits fail because we start to big yet don’t set up our environment to win.
We choose something too far out of our comfort zone to create as a habit.

You want to lose 20 lbs so you swear you’ll kick your 3 pop a day habit and run for 30 minutes every day. Starting today. It lasts until noon.

Then we fail and feel like crap and those feelings create a yuck that we are trying to escape through our bad habit. Thus, leading us back down the exact path we’re trying to avoid.

Our bad habits are a response to meet a deeply human need. Food, belonging, status, and reproduction.

Willpower only works so much, and not very often.

Once something is in our brain, the need and craving happens and gets more intense each time we think of it until seemingly out-of-the-blue there’s a donut in our mouth or we’re plunked down on the couch with the TV on.

As long as we see the cue in our environment, withholding from it only intensifies the craving.

The people who seem the most dedicated are actually not. They just lessen the need to actually use that willpower.

If you are trying to say, stop watching TV every night, you need to set up your environment to succeed.

Make the Good Visible and the Bad Invisible

You need to make the cues linked to the bad habits invisible and the cues linked to the good habits, more visible.

If the cue is removed, the craving won’t be triggered. Regardless of good or bad habit, it remains true.

Remove the cue and it won’t happen. So if its something you want to have happen, like working out daily, you need to put that cue front and centre.

For example, laying out your workout gear to change into first thing.

Your cues are part of your environment. Set up your environment for success.

If you remove the cue, the habit will still remain for the next time you are confronted with the cue. Even 20 years down the road.

The key is to change the craving.

Change the Craving

It’s after supper and the kids are in bed. The dishes still need to be done but ugh, as much as you say you want to get into the habit of cleaning everything up before you check-out, it just doesn’t seem to happen.

Instead you flop down in your favourite chair and pulling out your phone to just relax. You are exhausted.

Sound familiar?

The cue is bedtime being done, then the craving to flop and pull out your phone sets in. That feeling you get feels so good because you’re so tired. And you get to share in that feeling with all the other exhausted friends out there.

Only, 10 minutes ago you were wide awake and telling yourself the dishes were next. What happened?

The cue. An instantaneous microscopic cue that you didn’t even realize your brain was seeing. It all seems to just happen.

So how do you change it?
You have two options, change the cue or change the craving associated to the cue.

To change the cue you could go into a different room first to do another habit, before walking past that chair. Another habit can be putting out your workout gear, or getting yourself ready for bed (face washed, teeth brushed), doing some stretches or light exercises.

You can leave your phone in a cupboard at bedtime and only get it out after the cleaning up has been done (make the craving the reward!).

To change the craving, that’s an exciting one because that’s what I did. During nap times I would normally scroll my phone. Wasting so much precious time.

To kill the addiction, I deleted my apps and placed something that fit a goal, in the exact location of the apps.
That way when the cue of naptime triggered my hand picking up my phone and opening the app, it was a notes app.

By the time my conscience clued it, I already had the app open and may as well write to meet my goal.
Now, I crave writing at naptime. It’s my creative flow time.

The trigger is still the same but I’ve switched the craving.

Now, one word on social media. It’s designed to be addictive so if you’re using it outside of this cue, you may find it much harder to replace the craving unless you consistently replace the craving for the scroll when there are other triggers.

I will say its been life-changing replacing this long-term negative habit with a long-term positive habit. Well worth the consistent effort needed!

Habit stack – make it easy to start

Often the habits we want to have, are too complex for us to just immediately change and stick with.
Your brain needs to ease into the pattern of remembering.

Think of something you already do regularly.

You wake up, you get dressed, you brush your teeth, you go to work, you eat, you come home, etc. List out all of the things you do on a consistent basis.

Now, start doing your new habit after one of those. Be specific.

After putting the kids to bed I will do 10 pushups in my bedroom.

Rewarding – make it easy to finish

Start with a small task. If your goal is to run 5 miles a day, start with getting your gear on and just going outside every day.

If you think, “wow, that’s easy, I can do that!” then you’ll do it.

If it’s too easy you’ll start to say, “but maybe later because I…”

No, make it a little bit more challenging so your brain is stimulated by the challenge, yet not discouraged by it.

Set a goal that is just challenging, but not out of your realm of doable.
Break your ultimate habit goal into levels you can move up to. Better to be consistent and increase the difficulty than to start and give up because it was too hard.

For example, let’s say you want to do 200 squats a day. Well that’s pretty intense to do all at once. Could you break it down? How about doing 5 squats, that’s sounds more doable.

Break habits you want down to the ridiculous. The doable. The easy action item that is so simple it can be moved to autopilot quickly.

Our brain wants to move things to autopilot. That’s how habits are created. You do them without even thinking.

Your Brain Will Defy You

It won’t be perfect, it won’t be easy, but it IS doable.

When you miss a day in doing your habit, or miss a cue, get back in it within 2 days.

Any longer than that and you’re starting from scratch but starting is better than nothing.

Your habits won’t be built over night, or even in 30 days. It takes action every single day.

Some habits take years to fully form, some can take just a few days. Make your cues and cravings visible and rewarding.

And keep checking in with the identity you’re aligning yourself with.
For further reading on the power of habits, read James Clear’s Atomic Habits.