Once again not gone to training and instead spent a lot of time on the phone? Whether sports, everyday life or relationship: Bad habits can be replaced by good habits in just a few steps.
Customary researchers? Yes, that really exists! And they open the eyes of many people to all the things you do every day without making them aware – and who you might think about.
Because 43 percent of the daily behavior are habits. You do something without thinking about it big, without weighing or consciously deciding.
How to get out of bed. How to organize the order of showers, brushing teeth and Co. What to do for breakfast. Whether you go to the office by car or by bike. When and how often you pull out the smartphone.
All automated. All habits.
Micro Habits can be useful
These small habits, English micro habits, make up almost half of their own behavior. And that’s a good thing.
Because habits are like the fast lane on the highway – they make sure that you get closer to your destination faster, without thinking again at every trip whether you are not better turning away.
Should the brain also actively deal with it, there would be less time and capacity for other important decisions.
“Because habits are behaviors that are used to do as little as possible
Habits decide on health
It is only annoying that habits are not only useful, but often unhealthy and dangerous.
For example, the handle to the cigarette, the glass of wine after work or the opening of the refrigerator door looking for a snack.
The Robert Koch Institute has once listed the seven leading health risk factors in Germany: smoking, too much alcohol, too little fruit and vegetables, too little exercise, overweight, high blood cholesterol levels and hypertension.
“The first points are habits, the last ones the result of certain habits,” gives Dr. to think about hammer. Micro Habits therefore determine your own health, and eating habits determine life expectancy.
Train yourself to Micro Habits
But they also determine the success. Athletes, for example, train habits to improve.
Sprinter Usain Bolt (eight-time Olympic champion from Jamaica) has become acried to put sleeping on his to-do list at the top. Everything else can push or fail, sleep as the most important source of regeneration.
one of the fastest marathon runners in the world, keeps it similar: At 9 p.m., he goes to bed – and writes down in his training diary beforehand how much he walked a day.
M-I-K-R-O: 5 steps to conscious habits
This is exactly what everyone can use: habits can be trained. As early as the end of the 1940s, neurologists from the USA found that the brain learns best from repetitions.
The more often you do something, the more firm the nerve connections become for this behavior. An arduous mountain path becomes a comfortable motorway.
According to Matthias Hammer, it takes five steps to get annoying habits and establish new, good habits. He calls them M-I-K-R-O: notice, find intention, manage complications, build routine, act without reproach.
Step 1: Save
“To change habits, we need to notice them first. Only in perceiving what we actually do and what it does with us can we change the gear and steer ourselves in the desired direction,” says Hammer.
He recommends a Micro-Habit diary as a strategy: Here you note all habits when you do it and how you feel at the moment and after.
For example, what triggers to open the game app on the phone? What do you feel at that and after? With exercise habits – how many steps are you actually going every day? – trackers are practical helpers.
Step 2: Find the intention
Once you have made yourself aware of habits, you have to ask yourself the deciding questions: Do I want that? Is this important to me? Does this bring me closer to my goals?
Hammer: “I have often experienced it: when people have found access to the inwardly felt and experienced purpose of their lives, they have been able to muster the strength to break destructive habits and direct their behavior in the desired direction.”
He recommends the technique of looking back into the future: Imagine you are 80 years old and look back at your life – what habit are you proud of, which one is unpleasant to you?
It also helps to take notes: achievable concrete goals such as “walk 30 minutes walk three times a week in the morning” to write a note and to install the clearly visible in the apartment.
Step 3: stay away
… and manage complications. Changing habits would be too easy if not so many stones were in the way.
Nobody would nibble more chips, everyone would regularly lace up the running shoes or check in at the gym.
But that’s not the way it works, everyone is on the way to new habits. It helps to become aware: What could keep me or slow me down? What could be a serious obstacle?
“Task now to develop if-then plans to overcome potential obstacles,” says expert Hammer.
Step 4: Build routine
After recognizing one’s goals and defining the right steps, it is about the steps becoming habits.
Do you want to lose weight? You want to achieve this with running? You have a suitable route and after the first attempt you felt really good? Now it has to become a Micro Habit.
It is precisely this three-oric principle – behavior – habit that one must keep looking at oneself, advises the expert. And remember the good feeling.
Anyone who can feel how well they will feel afterwards is much more motivated before the sport. This feeling can trigger a desire that automatically becomes a habit.
A clever move is to set reminder stimuli for the planned routines:
The packed sports bag in
To establish routines, help when then rules again: If it does not rain tomorrow morning, I ride to work by bike. If there is a vegan dish in the restaurant, I order this.
Or with bad habits: If I want to grab a cigarette, I go around the block instead.
Step 5: Coaching yourself
…without accusations. Some behaviour change is easy, most do not become. You will need patience and have to deal with setbacks.
Therefore, you have to learn to be a good coach. Not a judge who condemns, but a coach who straightens up and motivates, but keeps an eye on the goal.
“Relapses are deeply human,” says expert Hammer. “Evaluated habits do not build up against us through a steel-hard will and hardness, but as an expression of a friendly dealing with ourselves.”
With Micro Habits you change habits, but not yourself. Hammer: “Gend yourself. As you are now, you are exactly right.”
To keep this regularly becomes a habit.
