How to (actually) Level Up Your HABITS!

5 easy steps to help you level up on some of the habits that you have!

This blog post is all about our good habits! We’re going to walk through how to level up those habits and stay consistent with them!

We already know how important habits are. Habits make up our life, and they either work for us, or against us. Obviously we want our habits to work for us, that’s why we want to work on improving those habits.

It does get challenging at times to keep up with good habits. Funny enough, while bad habits are hard to break, good habits are hard to keep. That’s why, with the good habits, we want to make life as easy as possible for us!

These steps that we will go through will help you not only become self-aware of your habits, but also help you make life easy on yourself when trying to build these new habits.

You’ll see that they are actually quite simple, and how even the smallest differences could determine whether we stick or break with our good habits.

STEP 1:

LIST all your habits & and add habits that you want to build

The thing with habits is that because they are automatic, they can be easily overlooked. When we’re so used to doing certain things, we never take the chance to question if it’s the right habit or if it’s something that we should be doing.

That’s why changing habits or figuring out new habits can be hard sometimes. This is because sometimes, we lack that self-awareness of the habits that we’re doing.

So one of the first things you can do to level up your habits is to list your daily habits. Spend a day writing down on your list every time you have done a new habit. To make life easy, it’ll be easier to go by the quarters of the day. These are the quarters:

• MORNING – wake up time – 12pm
• MIDDAY – 12pm-3pm
• AFTERNOON – 3pm-6pm
• EVENING – 6pm-sleep

or you can also go by your daily routines such as:

• Morning Routine
• Night Routine
• Work Routine
• Study Routine
• Exercise Routine

It is better and easier to go by quarters of the day instead of routines because it’s easy to miss things when we try to go by routine.

You’re going to write every single detail. This is how my morning looks like:

1. Wake up
2. Walk to alarm
3. Turn off alarm
4. Turn on dim light
5. Walk back to bed
6. Pray
7. Get my iPad
8. Go on Pinterest for inspiration of the day
9. Go read incmedia.org articles for spiritual inspiration
10. Get my book
11. Read my book
12. Grab my journals
13. Write in my gratitude journal
14. Write my affirmations
15. Journal

This is from 5am to 5:50am alone,

As you can tell, it’s going to be a pretty hectic day, because just in that 50 minute period, there are already 15 habits that I’ve done.

By the end of the day, you can imagine that you probably already have a full list. Once you have that list, that’s when you actually get to look at each habit and reflect if it’s a good habit (+), bad habit (-), or a neutral habit (=).

Here was what my list used to look like in high school:

1. Wake up (=)
2. Snooze alarm (-)
3. Snooze alarm again (-)
4. Check phone (-)
5. Go on social media (-)
6. Check messages (-)
7. Go to bathroom (+)
8. Take a shower (+)
9. Brush my teeth (+)
10. Do my skincare (+)
11. Eat breakfast (+)
12. Watch the news (-)
13. Play games on my phone (-)

Now that you are self-aware of your current habits, make a list of habits that you want to build. So these new habits can either be replacement habits for your bad habits, or just simply new habits. My example is here:

Replacement habits:

• Snooze alarm -> drinking water
• Check phone, go on social media -> reading a book
• Check messages -> gratitude
• Watch the news -> go on a language app and do a 5 minute session
• Play games on my phone -> go on a quotes app.

New Habits

• Journaling
• Stretches
• Deep breathing exercises
• Going for a walk

Now that we have our lists and are more self-aware, we can go to our next steps!

STEP 2:

Habit Stacking

Now, let’s take those last two lists where we listed habits that we want to build.

One thing to make life easy for us, especially when remembering to do that habit is to just stack them on top of our current habits.

This is called habit stacking. Habit stacking is pretty much just stacking in new habits with current habits. It makes life easy for us because instead of getting caught up thinking about when we’re going to do a new habit, we just do that habit after a habit that we already do.

For example, one habit stacking looks like this:

Night Routine: Doing skincare (CURRENT HABIT), put face mask (CURRENT HABIT), then read more (NEW HABIT)

Morning Routine: Praying (CURRENT HABIT), Journalling (CURRENT HABIT), then read book (NEW HABIT)

Now, let’s see how the habits we listed above will all come together.

I’m going to bring back my original list for my habits during the morning:

1. Wake up
2. Snooze alarm
3. Snooze alarm again
4. Check phone
5. Go on social media
6. Check Messages
7. Go to Bathroom
8. Take a shower
9. Brush my teeth
10. Do my skincare
11. Eat breakfast
12. Watch the news
13. Play games on my phone

Now, what I’m going to do is to start revising the list with my replacement habits (they are in bold):

1. Wake up
2. Snooze alarm drink water
3. Snooze alarm again drink water
4. Check phone read book
5. Go on social media read book
6. Check messages gratitude
7. Go to bathroom
8. Take a shower
9. Brush my teeth
10. Do my skincare
11. Eat breakfast
12. Watch the news go on language app and do a 5 minute session
13. Play games on my phone go on a quotes app and read inspirational quotes

Okay, now we’re going to do the actual habit stacking with the new habits we wanted to build.

Current habit is labeled (C) and new habit is labeled (N)

• Wake up (C)
• Drink water (C)
• Deep breathing exercises (N)
• Read book (C)
• Journalling (N)
• Gratitude (N)
• Stretches (N)
• Go to bathroom (C)

I’ll leave it there because I think you’re beginning to notice a little pattern. Most of the new habits that we wanted to build are stacked between the current habits that we have.

This makes life a bit easier because they are in between habits we already have and it’s a little bit more easier to remember.

When it comes to building new habits, we want to make life as easy as possible… but we’ll expand more in the next couple of steps.

STEP 3:

WHO over WHAT first

One of the reasons why it’s hard to keep up with the good habits is because we keep focusing on the wrong thing – the “WHAT”.

Instead, we want to focus more on WHO we need to become in order to keep up with that new habit. You need to establish an identity that comes with accomplishing that particular outcome. I’ve wrote and expanded on this a lot in the blog post on what to do first before starting a habit. Here is my example:

• I want to get in the habit of writing -> becoming a writer is the identity.
• I want to get into the habit of writing songs -> becoming a songwriter is the identity.
• I want to learn how to design clothes -> becoming a fashion designer is the identity.
• I want to eat healthier as one of my habits -> becoming a healthy eater is the identity.

It seems simple, but it’s actually quite important. You actually do need to establish the identity that comes with having that habit.

Because once you have that identity, it’s going to help you a lot better with behaving like that person with the identity. For example, if I wanted to build the habit of writing, and I identified myself as a writer, I will start to behave like one, like this:

• A writer would set up a time in the day just for writing.
• A writer would have a separate writing space just for writing.
• A writer would just simply write what comes to mind, and expand more on it in a later time.
• A writer doesn’t put pressure on themselves for perfection.

Even just having a simple goal to have a certain body transformation. You identify yourself, and then you start behaving like a person who already has that body transformation. It could go like this:

• This person takes the stairs instead of the elevator.
• This person sticks with a meal plan instead of just deciding what to eat on the go.
• This person goes to the gym 3 times a week.

So have a think of a goal that you have, especially a habit that you want to build. Think about the identity, before you jump straight into what you need to do to keep up with that habit.

STEP 4:

Make things easy for yourself

Okay, this is extremely important! While bad habits are hard to break because they’re so tempting, good habits are hard to keep because they’re not attractive enough most times.

Why do you think with bad habits, we’re told to get rid of the temptations? Like with junk food, we need to get rid of the temptations to break the habit. And the bad habit with watching too much TV, we need to hide the remote to get rid of the temptation.

The same applies with good habits except we’re not getting rid of the temptation, we’re making sure that we see it as many times as we can.

We want to set our environment up for success. When we build good habits, we want to make things easy for us. Because let’s face it, if we need to go and find something, and go through the hassle just to do a good habit, it’s going to be hard to keep doing it.

For instance, we want to start building the habit of going to the gym. But when we have to go and find our gym clothes, and go through the hassle of packing our gym bag, it’s going to be hard to stay consistent with it.

That’s why instead, we are to have our gym bag and gym clothes ready to go out the door, so all we need to do is grab it. We just need to make things as easy as possible for us.

The same with just brushing your teeth. I’m going to assume that your toothbrush is just by the sink is the bathroom. You just grab it and brush your teeth… no second thoughts.

All of the habits I do now, I don’t rely on motivation anymore. They became so automatic that I do them without thinking of it. It took me over a year to make reading a habit so automatic, it’s like brushing my teeth. Because how do you know if a habit is automated? It’s a habit like brushing your teeth – you do it without thinking about it, with no second thoughts.

That’s why you want to set your environment up for success with your new habits. Make sure that the cues and reminders to do your habits are clear and you can see them.

If you need to drink more water, put water bottles all over the house. If you need to eat more fruit, put a fruit bowl right in the middle of the kitchen. If you need to go jogging more, place your running shoes right by the door. Make things easy for you, because the moment you have to take a few extra seconds to find something, we lose that momentum.

STEP 5:

Consistency for Automation

Now the last step is to stay consistent with them! The more consistent you are with them, the more automated they become. How automated?

Well, think about those basic habits such as brushing your teeth. It became such an automatic habit that you know exactly when you are going to do it. There is no second thought with doing it… you just do the habit. It’s part of your life, and without doing it in your day, it just feels weird.

That’s how a habit should feel like! Whatever habit that you have, make it a goal to make it as automated as possible!

And the only thing to do to achieve that goal is to keep repeating the habit, and stay with consistent with it on a regular (if not daily!) basis.

I stopped relying on motivation, habits are the way

Before I wrap up this blog post, I just want to say this…. I stopped relying on motivation because it comes and goes. If I were to rely on motivation to help me achieve my goals, they would have never been achieved. Because to achieve anything, you need to show up on a regular basis, you can’t just do it once in a while. If you can show up once in a while, then maybe then you can rely on motivation.

Otherwise, it’s unreliable. That’s why you NEED habits, you need to work on leveling your habits. That’s why we outlined those steps to help make habits as easy as possible for you. In reality, it is supposed to be quite simple. So don’t give up, keep going, you will get there!

-Lauren 😊

Book(s) this post was inspired by:

(not sponsored in any way!)

• Atomic Habits – James Clear

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Read this blog post to have a better understanding of how habits are built!

Read this blog post to understand why it’s hard to keep up with good habits!

Something to Think About Before Starting a New Habit

How to Use Self-Talk to Build Your Habits

Essential Habits to Start With! (for personal growth!)

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