If you are getting willing to set annual goals for 2023, stop. You’re most likely building and breaking habits that are completely wrong, especially if you were super active in January, but find yourself distracted or overwhelmed in February, experts say. Before we get into the specifics of how to start or kick a habit that you’ll actually stick to, there are a few things you need to know.
The most important thing is that the habit is actually separate from the goal. Wendy Wood, professor emeritus of psychology and business at the University of Southern California and author of Good habits, bad habits: Science creates sustainable positive changes. “But habit is how you stick to a behavior.”
That’s because once something becomes a habit it’s hard to break, Wood says. This can work in your favor or against you. You’re forming habits regardless of whether you’re consciously deciding—it’s your brain’s way of freeing up mental space for more important things—so you might as well give it some thought. . If not, chances are that some of your habits will be the ones you don’t want or are actively sabotaging your efforts to achieve your goals.
In reality, Studies have shown that a significant amount of our behavior in a day is habitual. “Nearly 45% of the time, people repeat behavior in a familiar context without thinking about what they are doing,” Wood says of the studies she has conducted. When we are stressed or tired, we go back to our established routines. This makes it even harder to try to form new habits based on our goals—let alone try to kick a bad habit.
“We’re trying to do a lot of things in life, not just follow our New Year’s resolutions,” Wood said. “We focus on these things and then our commitment to change is really diluted by the many other goals we’re pursuing and other things we’re trying to tackle on a daily basis. “
Building a habit can take a lot of time and energy, so it’s important to make sure you choose behaviors that you really want to do and enjoy doing. While there’s no typical amount of time it takes to build a habit, it’s something that will eventually get easier. “It’s a cumulative, iterative process over time,” says Wood. So be patient with yourself.
Thankfully, there are a few things you can do to make habit formation easier, hopefully when you’re stressed or tired you’ll have good habits to fall back on.
1. Make a list of your goals, prioritize them, and choose one
Alana Mendelsohn, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute for Brain Behavior, says the worst thing you can do when trying to build a habit is to choose multiple goals and try to do everything. simultaneous.
Instead, Mendelsohn suggests making a list of the goals you’re trying to achieve and arranging them in order of importance. “When people say ‘I want to build better habits,’ there are almost always three things,” she says. “I want to go to bed earlier, I want to eat healthier and I want to exercise.”
