The Beauty of Habits In Your Day-to-Day Life

The beauty of habits in your day-to-day life is the profound influence they have on who you are and what you do.

Through our habits, we shape our present and our future. The things we do day-to-day form our future self. It’s biologically in our brain structure to develop habits. Our mind functions through cognitive ease.

Can you imagine having to exhaust mental effort in every single decision that takes place in your life?

If you look at your day-to-day life, you will see that you complete repetitive tasks almost naturally and with ease every single day. This concept can be easily understood when you get into the car to drive somewhere, and once you get to the location you can’t fully remember the drive. Your mind is able to focus on other things. But if you think when you first began to drive, it felt like a complicated task. You were engaged and focused, learning everything. Driving has become a habit that no longer needs the mental effort as it did the first day you learned to drive. Most of these habits are structured within our unconscious mind. We aren’t truly in control of what we do.

In Alistair Horscroft TEDx talk, 7 seconds to change your life, he speaks about the influence of our unconscious and conscious processing. Our conscious mind, the one that we have actual control over in our decisions, is the observer to what the unconscious has already decided 7 seconds before the conscious mind knew what was happening.

We have to be aware of our habits, and aware of the influence our unconscious mind has on our day-to-day life.

Our entire life is made up of habits. Our habits define who we are, what we do, and what we will accomplish.

A habit is first made up of a cue: something that triggers the action to occur. The action then occurs, followed up with a reward. The reward enables the habit to be repeated. Our brains adopt these habits consciously and subconsciously.

For those who struggle with their health, habits are the true focus in maintaining a good balance of healthy food and exercise. However, there isn’t much emphasis on them in the diet industry. One reason is because they won’t be able to make a profit off of you if you take your health into your own hands. If it takes a lot of mental effort to eat healthy food and make it to the gym, we aren’t going to do it. This is why we have to incorporate healthy foods and exercise on a daily basis until it becomes a habit, but that’s another article!

Our habits can be a number of things: our actions, thoughts, feelings, and moods. All of these are really based on the mindset we have. Our thoughts lead into our feelings and then into our mood, which then form into our actions.

1. Thoughts

• What do you think about yourself?
• What do you think about others?

2. Feelings

• How do you feel?
• How do you want to feel?
• Are your thoughts holding you back from that?

3. Actions

• What are your current actions?
• Do they reflect your goals?
• Do they resemble your ideal life?
• Do your thoughts and feelings align with the actions you want to see in your life?

Everything stems from our quality of thinking. Once you begin to change your mindset, you will then be on the path to change your actions.

What are your limiting beliefs that hold you back?

Who do you want to be? Do your habits align with that vision? What habits can you implement into your life to reach that change?

Starting the Change

How often do you think to yourself, “I can just do it tomorrow”? You are already holding yourself back. You will continue to put it off until tomorrow, or next week, or next year. We only have one life, and tomorrow may never come!

We know this, and yet we still struggle with change. We also hear stories about people who have made changes in their life, and regret not making it sooner. Yet we still continue to waste our lives living with our bad habits.

We make being actionable appear more difficult than it is. As we make the changes and complete the healthy habits, they only get easier and easier. It’s psychologically proven!

What’s holding you back today?

Convert those thoughts into something positive and empowering, and start making the changes you want to see in your life today! 

Take Action: As you go throughout your day, acknowledge each task you do. Begin to understand the habits you have developed, what triggers them, and t

he reward that follows. For bad habits, come up with ideas to convert them into something positive. After idea storming, implement the habits into your life. Are you able to sustain them? If not, why? Try a different route. Habits are said to take 30 days to establish in your life.

Click here for more articles on habits & behavior.

“Habits are powerful, but delicate. They can emerge outside our consciousness, or can be deliberately designed. They often occur without our permission, but can be reshaped by fiddling with their parts. They shape our lives far more than we realize—they are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense.”

– Charles Duhigg, “The Power of Habits”

Suggested Read: “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg