Strategies for making your habits sticks: Habit Reflection

Last week we discussed the 2 day strategy, a habit formation technique I’ve adopted with great success and hope you do too. Which brings us to our second strategy for helping keep habits stick. In the words of Ernest Dimnet “The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present”, using past successes as a recipe for future success is a very powerful strategy. This week I want to discuss this well-documented success strategy for sticking with habits: Habit Reflection.

We all have things that we’ve instituted to better ourselves over the course of our life. Habit reflection is simply looking at those things you’ve successfully applied in your past and using the lessons you learned from that success to help adopt your new desired habit.

Step 1: Pick a situation in your past where you were able to transfer a new habit into a long-term behavior.

Step 2: Think about what you did to adopt that new habit, the strategies you applied, what you learned, how you overcame obstacles… basically and tactics you used that lead to your success.

Step 3: Map out a plan for your new habit that uses similar tactics applied from your past success.

In a research study by clearerthinking.org this habit reflection method lead to applying the new habit practice 0.7 more times per week than other habit strategies (140% more compliance than any of the other 23 strategies tested.

Blog reference: https://www.fastcompany.com/90446008/we-studied-the-best-way-to-actually-make-a-new-habit-stick