This Is How To Make Good Habits Stick: 6 Secrets From Research
By Eric Barker • 06/17/16 1:15pm
1) Start With “Keystone Habits”
Exercising isn’t just good for you. It’s also a “keystone habit.” It’s a good change that often triggers other good changes, passively.
When I spoke to Charles Duhigg, author of the excellent book “The Power of Habit“, he explained that exercise leads people to unknowingly create other, often unrelated, good habits.
It makes you eat better. And helps you use your credit card less. And makes you more productive at work. Here’s Charles:
There’s this fundamental finding in science that some habits seem to matter more than others. When researchers look at how people change their habitual behaviors, they find when some changes occur, it seems to set off a chain reaction that causes other patterns to change as well. For some people, exercise is a good example of this. When you start exercising habitually, according to studies, you start eating more healthfully. That makes sense. You start feeling good about your body. For many people, when they start exercising, they stop using their credit cards quite so often. They procrastinate less at work. They do their dishes earlier in the day. It seems to be evidence that for many people, exercise is a keystone habit. Once you start to change your exercise habits, it sets off a chain reaction that changes other habits as well.
So maybe you already exercise. Or perhaps committing to the gym seems too daunting right now. What are other keystone habits? What alchemy do they all have in common?
Keystone habits change how you see yourself. And that’s what causes the cascade of positive change. Here’s Charles:
The power of a keystone habit draws from its ability to change your self image. Basically, anything can become a keystone habit if it has this power to make you see yourself in a different way.
So start with a habit that makes you see yourself as the kind of person you want to be.