How To Form New, Healthy Habits

What Is a Habit?

A habit is a behavior performed automatically and triggered by a specific context or stimulus.

Some habits, like locking the doors or regular exercise, are positive. They keep you sane and healthy. Other habits, such as smoking, nail-biting, doomscrolling, or drug use, can be harmful to your health.

What Makes a Habit Healthy?

Healthy habits are those that have a positive impact on your health, like maintaining a sleep schedule or meditating. A good habit is one that you want to repeat because it has positive consequences in your life — physically, emotionally, or psychologically.

Habits are generally formed without much active thought, but with persistence, you can shape them. Learning how to form healthy habits can help you improve your quality of life and, in some cases, they may help you live longer.

Tips for Building Healthy Habits

There are many things that you can do to help build healthy habits.

Identify Your Current Habits

Before you can start creating healthy habits or breaking bad ones, you must first identify your current habits and the habits you’d like to form. Consider prioritizing the habits you’d like to introduce into your routine, as trying to add too many at once can make it harder to stick with them.

Create A Plan

Once you’ve identified habits that you want to form, whether that is eating a healthier diet or starting an exercise program, you’ll want to form a plan. Forming a plan involves setting smaller goals and planning specific actions. This may mean identifying the things keeping you from your goal and finding a way to work around them.

You can create your plan by writing down a list, keeping a note in your phone, or even prompting AI to build a diet plan or exercise regime for you. Being able to revisit your plan can help you stay on track as you build your new habit.

Habits are formed through a process of cue, routine, and reward.

• The cue is a trigger to which your brain responds.
• A routine is the activity, emotion, or behavior that the brain uses to respond to the cue.
• The reward is how your brain determines whether the routine has a positive or negative effect.

As this process is repeated, habits are formed.

Practice

Staying on track can be challenging as you start to work toward your new habits. Since rewards are part of how your brain determines whether a habit is worth keeping, small positive rewards may help cement the new behaviors. Practicing and repeating the behaviors can help you stay on track and make these new behaviors habits.

Stay Positive

Keeping a positive attitude and looking toward future goals may also help you build new habits. A 2022 study from the Annual Review of Psychology found that attitude plays an important role in strengthening habits over time, both when creating new habits and avoiding bad ones.

Creating new habits takes time and persistence. Though you may have heard that it takes 21 days to change a habit, the reality is that it can range from 18 to 254 days, and the average is closer to 66 days.

Tools To Help Create a Healthy Habit

There are many tools that may help you form new, healthy habits.

5A Model

One of these tools is the 5A model. This framework was developed by the US Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF) and was designed for behavioral counseling for smoking cessation, but it can be broadened to include additional habits. The 5As are:

• Ask: Identify and document the habit that needs to be changed.
• Advise: Identify reasons that the change is necessary.
• Assess: Your willingness to change the habit.
• Assist: Come up with a list of things that you think may help you quit.
• Arrange: Follow up regularly.

The 5As are a tool for behavioral health counseling and a framework for forming new healthy habits.

Habit Stacking

Another tool that you can use for new habit formation is habit stacking. Stacking habits is a means of taking advantage of the habits you already have and using them to build new habits.

Habit stacking allows you to make small changes and build them up to stronger habits over time. You start by identifying your current habits and listing the new ones you want to form. After that, you can create a “stack” of habits that makes sense to you. Once that starts to work, you can continue adding habits to the stack to form a routine. If it doesn’t work, you may consider adding rewards to reinforce positive habits.

Repetition is one key to success. As you repeat these habits, you recruit more neurons and strengthen them, forming new connections.

How Can I Avoid Bad Habits?

Avoiding bad habits is difficult. Since the initial formation of habits is frequently unconscious, bad habits can form before you realize they’re forming. Additionally, even a habit that is often perceived as positive, such as exercise, can be detrimental if taken to extremes that cause harm. Fortunately, if you’re proactive about identifying your habits, you can identify bad habits and start to make changes.

The brain has a significant ability to change and adapt as needed. This ability to adapt structure and function is known as neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity can allow you to change bad habits and form new ones.

The same processes you can use to form new habits can help you extinguish or avoid bad ones. Identifying the processes, avoiding triggers, and then practicing the new processes can help you avoid these habits.

When Should I Get Professional Help?

If you’re struggling to break old habits or form new ones, it may be time to seek professional help.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is one of the primary forms of psychotherapy that can help you with brain adaptation and forming new habits (or breaking old ones). CBT helps you identify and understand your routines and what could interfere with your goals. Identifying and understanding these processes is one of the first steps in helping you to form new ones.

Changing habits, whether forming new ones or breaking bad ones, is a slow process that takes conscious effort and persistence. Fortunately, it’s never too late to start making positive changes in your life by forming healthy habits.