Healthy Habits and Routines

Techniques for Building Good Habits: Reminder, routine, reward. This sequence, when repeated, helps us to establish a habit, such as brushing our teeth for two minutes everyday, reading before bed, going for a run, doing the dishes and anything else.

How long does it take to form a habit? Although there is talk that it takes 21 days, 66 days, 77 days and other numbers of days to form a habit, in fact there is no set time it takes to develop a new habit.

◇ Habit formation depends on the conditions of your life around that habit, how different it is from what you have done before, the habit you are trying to form, and who you are.

Nonetheless, it can be helpful to assign a specific period of time to concentrate on building a habit, and this can be a good tool for doing so.

Stating, for example, that you are going to give special attention to developing the habit of brushing your teeth for two minutes each morning for a month is a good way to make habit formation more manageable, even if there isn’t a magic amount of time to make a habit automatic.

Types of Habits:

◇ Thinking habits ◇ Emotional habits ◇ Behavioral habits

The Difference Between Habit and Routine:

Habits are automatic practices which develop over an extended period of time. We can have good habits, bad habits, and everything in between, from turning off the lights when we leave a room, to speeding.

A habit is an action that requires little to no conscious effort to initiate.

A routine, on the other hand, is a deliberate practice which contains multiple actions within it, and generally requires deliberate intention.