The Healthy Habit Revolution

Image credit: Enes Kemal Ergin

The Healthy Habit Revolution

The Healthy Habit Revolution by Derek Doepker, is a laconic guide to the Habit development. Even though the book is designed to give reader 21 days to read, I read through it like I read all Personal Development book, while taking notes.

Day 1: Why You Can’t Change Habits Until You Change This First:

  • We typically only see, and therefore recognize, the end result and not the mundane things that were behind achieving it.
  • In today’s society a person is more likely to be congratulated for losing 50 pounds rather than eating salad everyday to achieve 50 pound weight loss.
  • We need to enjoy the process of practicing(there is a really nice book I’ve read some time ago called Practicing Mind.)
  • Another reason is to have hard time starting a healthy habit is a fear of failure.
  • The focusing on only results will distract you, which ultimately keep you away from achieving the result.

Day 2: The Seed of Transformation:

  • The most natural way to feel the need of habit change happens when your identity changes a little (Expand here in the blog post)
  • To believe that change is possible for oneself is also a must
  • Outside feelings like anger, which might lead to “I will prove all of you wrong” idea, could be a good push
  • Changing the identity, will change your behaviors, and vice-verse.

 

Day 3: How Your Habits Work:

  • Habit development (as a cycle) consists of 3 steps, which is introduced in Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit:
    • The Cue, what triggers the habit
      • The Routine, habitual behavior
      • The reward, pleasure get, that makes you want to repeat the habit
  • Behavior can have different emotional impacts on different people.
  • There are six human needs, which are really important because they are the reason we feel rewarded by something emotional.
    • Certainty (comfort)
    • Variety (excitement, entertainment)
    • Connection
    • Significance
    • Growth
    • Contribution
  • Old/Bad habits are easy to remove because they hit one of the 6 needs mentioned above.
  • Our target is to replace them with healthier ones, using those 6 needs. New habits should be stable if not, the old habits will be replaced with another bad habit.
  • The habits stay programmed in the brain, it’s near impossible to get rid of a bad habit entirely, but replace it with a better/healthier alternative habit that meets the same emotional need is possible.

 

Day 4: What Will Upgrade Your Life?:

  • Keystone habits are the ones create a chain of events for positive change in person’s life, such as eating healthy, sleeping early and waking up early.

Day 5: Why Don’t Need Much Motivation to Succeed:

  • Even the easiest of tasks could seem overwhelming at first, if one doesn’t  know where to begin.
  • Getting a perfect plan is not necessary, also most of the time impossible.
  • Find a first step to start acting, that’s all what it takes.
  • Start with a small action that you can do every day.
  • In order to develop a habit, find an extremely small target to hit each day.
  • Momentum creates Motivation.
  • “Get obsessed with consistency.”  Amir Siddiqui
  • You often won’t feel motivated until after you get started. Momentum creates motivation.

Day 6: Remembering Your Habit

  • Remember your habit by having a visual cue.
  • Need cue to trigger a new habit, which could be visual or auditory reminder, a prior action in your routine, or a time of a day.

Day 7: The Right and Wrong Types of Rewards

  • Extrinsic motivation includes external rewards like prices and money on the other hand, in intrinsic motivation, the motivation or rewards comes from within yourself.
  • The feeling of accomplishing something that require some effort creates a positivity that motivates you, like in case of gamers, this could be applied to the habit development process.
  • Positive self-talk after completing a task can be a good motivator reward.
  • Negative self-talk is on the other hand is a saboteur of the motivation.
  • Immediate gratification when tap into intrinsic motivation. (Self-talk and self-recognition)  

Day 8: Guaranteed Long-Term Success

  • Slip-ups will happen sooner or later, what matters is to get back on track fast! (Ask what can I learn from this.)
  • Slip-ups could be an opportunity to learn how to make habits life-proof.
  • Overcompensation is a trap that people might fall into, which leads to burnouts.  

Day 9: It’s Your Life, Do What You Want

  • To please other people drain more energy that just try to please yourself. (Be yourself???)
  • Bossing yourself around using language like “you must” and “you should” creates resentment and potentially drains willpower.
  • Use language that reflects you are making a conscious choice because of the positive benefits.

 

Day 10: The Overlooked Key to Healthy Habits

  • The desire to avoid pain is a stronger motivator than the desire to gain pleasure.
  • Motivator will keep you focused. (Punishment)
  • Having an accountability partner is important because you might need some outside support, and when you told someone about what you are doing, it creates a small pressure on you so that you will be less likely to drop out from your habit.  

Day 11: Using the Force Stronger than Willpower

  • “Environment is stronger than Willpower” Paramahansa Yogananda
  • Positive environment, lesser willpower, Negative environment, more willpower
  • Some management of positive environment examples:
    • Posting inspirational pictures and quotes where they can be readily seen
    • Getting rid of or hiding temptations such as unhealthy food,
    • Shutting off or turning phones to airplane mode when doing important tasks,
    • Blocking distracting websites using softwares
    • Spending more time with uplifting people and less with poor influences.
  • Always bring positive influences in your life because getting rid of bad one not always possible.  

Day 12: How you can Feel Ridiculously Awesome on command

  • Motivation can go up or down, depending on the mood
  • You can manage your mood, remembering to manage your state when it’s poor is the real key to success.
  • Physical movement, music, change of clothes can alter your state.

 

Day 13: What Crazy Sports Fans Can Teach You about Habits

  • Changing your language can alter your identity, and beliefs
  • Referring yourself or your things using “My” will create stronger connection with habits
  • You can look in the mirror and make convincing statements to yourself, this will help reinforce a new identity.

 

Day 14: Escaping the Black Hole of Repeated Mistakes

  • Remembering is the most essential part, because we usually know what we do.
  • Reviewing the day before the sleep like asking; what did you do, what something you can do better, how did the habit helped you today, will help

Day 15: Simpler is Smarter – True or False?

  • To get started faster is easier by subtracting and simplifying the tasks/habits but to grow you have to add and upgrade.
  • If the things kept too simple, it can stagnate progress
  • Additions or change is necessary for growth, but addition should be slowly otherwise getting overwhelmed will be inevitable.

 

Day 16: 3 Magic Words to Effortlessly Overcome Overwhelm

  • Getting momentum will bring the motivation with it.
  • If you see all the steps at one it is certain that you will feel overwhelmed, break the task into steps and focus on them one by one.
  • Being too vague or choose to be inactive is the reason people become overwhelmed in the process of breaking the steps.
  • Ask yourself, Can I just do this tiny step?, if the answer is no, break it down until something that you could start doing immediately.  

Day 17: Why Sacrifice Doesn’t Have to Suck

  • “Is what I’m saying ‘yes’ to important enough to say ‘no’ to something else significant in my life?”
  • If you focus on the short-term pain of the sacrifice, you will miss the long-term gain that it will bring.  

Day 18: Handling the Things that Hold You Back

  • A hidden cause of sabotage, is worrying about what others will think.
  • For habits that have a social component, the desire for approval can be a big motivating factor either supporting or hindering your habit development.
  • It’s possible to worry about what others will think of you after your new habit leads to significant changes in your life.
  • A person who says “he/she don’t have time” has actually other things they’re prioritizing more than what they say they don’t have time for.
  • Other problem is that people who say they don’t have resources is usually lack resourcefulness not resources.
  • Ask questions about what’s possible rather than make statements about what’s impossible.
  • It’s not about an instant solution, but rather taking steps to get you moving forward.

 

Day 19: Visualizing 2.0

  • To make your habits subconscious choice, there is a genius way to make the subconscious, let’s say we want to be able to wake up early with one alarm only. When you fully awake you practice in bed, just close your eyes and put your alarm for 5 min later, when the alarm goes off take a deep breath and get up out of the bed quickly. Repeating this in different days for some time will develop a subconscious habit of waking up faster and better.
  • When you visualize yourself doing the habit is the mental form of practice.

 

Day 20: The Fool-Proof Way to Always Find Your Next Step

  • How to take little steps to the next level?
  • Some outsiders perspective help you see your blind spots.
  • Innovation in habit development is great but try to find something proved is more efficient to develop something new.

 

Day 21: What to Do When you Want Bigger, Better, Faster Results.

  • To invest and commit more will transfer your life more, and to be able to achieve that, 21-90 day challenges are proven to be the time period of habit development.
  • When you invest/sacrifice time, money, and/or emotions into something, that is more likely that you will stick to it.

Revealing the Hidden Lessons

  • Everyone of has have an inner critic, called and ego(?), tells you that you are not good enough, comparing yourself to others.
  • Getting rid of this inner critic is not possible, but recognizing who that is will help you overcome the negative motivation.
  • Growth is one of the six human needs and it requires confronting and overcoming what you are not comfortable with, which is the exact same situation that you find yourself into when you overcome the voice of ego.

  • “Everything can either serve or enslave you depending on how you respond to it.” Derek Doepker  

  • Successful people start moving before seeing the entire path.
  • We try to see the entire path before even start moving, which makes us stay where we are because to see the entire path is not possible. Even if you think you see the entire path, it will change along the way.

 

  • Single compromise can create a “what-the-hell” effect (Janet Polivy)
  • If you let one compromise that will create more, and you will end up saying, “I’ve already messed up my diet today, so I’ll just indulge and start fresh tomorrow.”

 

  • Being flexible is not always bad though. Good habits can be destructive when you are so strict about it, that it my destroy other things in your life.

Simple Keystone Habits

  • Meditation
  • Reading, Studying, and Applying Personal Development
  • Physical Health Habits
  • Morning productivity

 

Failing with Mini Habits

  • There could be some reasons of failure when try to build up your habits:
    • Not taking your habit seriously, which leads to forgetting to do it daily
    • Setting too many mini habits at once
    • Not really wanting to have that habit
    • Setting too small mini-habits for start.