Two Habits to Change Your Year

Would you like to be more satisfied in the new year? If so, don’t resolve to make better decisions. Instead, put in place better habits.

As Charles Duhigg writes in The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, “Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they’re not. They’re habits.”

The most effective way for you to move in the direction you want to go is to develop healthy habits. Automatic behaviors, thoughts or feelings that you carefully cultivate. But how? Habits are composed of three steps:

1. A cue, or a trigger, that provokes the brain into selecting a habit.
2. A routine, most commonly pictured as physical but could be mental or emotional.
3. A reward that provides feedback to the brain if this habit is worth repeating.

Therefore, it’s not enough to consider only the routine you want to repeat automatically. To create a new habit, you must consider the trigger and a way to signal a reward when the habit is performed.

Many habits can bring change. Emotional, physical, spiritual, relational, etc. It’s so easy to be overwhelmed and underperforming. So today consider changing just two habits that can yield tremendous results for you.

1. Start Your Day Well

There’s a reason you exit every ski chairlift on a slight downhill: momentum that propels you forward. Too many people start their day responding or reacting – to news, social media, email, chores and more. They effectively start their day on an incline and often feel overwhelmed and playing catchup rather than on top of things.

The first thing you must do is to define your “well.” Consider your desired physical, emotional and mental state you want to begin your day. Then design the routines to achieve those outcomes.

The cue for most people is obvious: an alarm. But even that experience is worth thinking through. I wake at 5:20 AM each day courtesy of the iOS Bedtime Mode Wakeup Sound (I use First Light). No startling alarm that jars one awake. Instead, it’s a gentle sound that comes on and increases. And while I may not always be thrilled to get up, I never desire to punch my phone like an old alarm clock.

My wife and I share a similar routine: make coffee, brush our teeth, read, meditate and journal. Every day in response to our trigger, requiring no decision. No glancing at email or any outside communication until this routine is complete.

Mondays, Fridays, and Saturdays we follow that with exercise (Tuesday and Thursday we take yoga and spin classes in the evening). Next come showers, making breakfast and packing lunches.

We are now well-positioned to have the best day we can.

Our reward for waking early and following our routines? We have time to walk to the bus stop together. It takes less than 10 minutes, but it’s an emotional and relational boost for us. We discuss the insights from our journaling and review our plan for the evening. It feels great to be on the same page with things in order.

2. Close Your Day Well

For many people, the end of the day is similar to stumbling across a finish line. Barely. You enter full-on recovery mode, seeking comforts and distractions to enjoy before you have to face the next day’s challenges.

Closing your day with purpose won’t change the day you experienced, but it can change the way it affects you. And if you’re in a relationship, the way you are affecting others.

First, decide your trigger. For us, it’s dinner time. Whether we workout, make dinner, run errands or do some chore, we do our best to end with a meal together. For us, that signals a transition to close our day.

Meals for us and daughters are highly relational, and we try to create the environment to support interaction. Background music, but no television. Multiple people contribute to doing the dishes, and then some kind of shared entertainment – a recorded show, or reading. A quick review of the next day (mostly to remind me) and heading to bed based on what time we will wake up.

When we are at our best, my wife and I close with some kind of question before going to sleep. It might be something like, “What was the highlight of your day?”, or “What did you learn today?”, or “You told me on our walk to the bus X, how did that work out?” The goal is a bit of reflection, a positive emotion, and a shared connection.

You Got This!

Do we do all of this rigorously each day? No. We have events, requests, extra work, and more. But the routines are there and we respond to the triggers whenever we can.

Start by identifying your version of well for the start and end of your days. Put in place routines to help you achieve it. Soon the routines will become habits and you’ll be amazed at the difference it will make not only in the bookends of your day but the moments in between.