Chapter 3 - The Rhythmic Guide to Crafting Personal Habits with Immediate Rewards

Unlock the secret mechanisms of your mind as we delve into the intriguing world of habit formation—no lab coat required! I'll take you through the highways and byways of our daily routines, illustrating how our brains carve out shortcuts to efficiency through my own tales of post-work attire changes and autopilot drives. Get ready to challenge the myth that habits are the hallmarks of the mundane; instead, discover how they serve as the springboard to free your mental prowess for the more complex symphonies of life.

This episode doesn't just dissect the anatomy of habits; it hands you the tools to sculpt your own. I recount the tale of how my morning coffee became the cue for my newfound gym dedication, emphasizing the allure of immediate rewards in making lifestyle changes stick. From the practicality of habit tracking apps to the joy of hitting those sweet, sweet milestones, we cover it all. Ready your mind, embrace the cues, and let's embark on the journey to create habits that resonate with the rhythm of your life.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to the Can Things Get Better podcast with Sarah Hamill. Hey y'all, I wanted to pop on here. I know it's been quite a while at least a month since I have done a podcast episode and I figured it was about time to come on and do one. So we are on Chapter 3 of Atomic Habits and I have to be honest sorry, my hair and I didn't do my makeup this morning, so I'm just kind of like blah, anyway. So this chapter is a really short one and I think that that was probably why I was having such a hard time doing this episode.

Speaker 1: 0:47

It only took me about 15 minutes to listen to it and I listened to it three different times because I was like, okay, this stuff is pretty basic, but if you aren't really familiar with the lifestyle of building up your habits, these are really vital skills that you need to be able to learn as you start to develop your habits. So, basically, the introduction of this chapter we're talking about why habits are important and James goes into how we use our minds when we're making decisions. It takes a lot of effort to make different decisions and I can't remember if we've talked about this already, but basically, a habit when you build a habit, it makes it easier for your mind to make decisions. So, for example, one of the examples that he says is like when you're coming home from work and you're tired, you probably have the habit of getting into more comfortable clothes, maybe turning the TV on, sitting down and having a snack. Those are things that your mind the first time you came home from work. You may not remember this, but you probably at some point thought, okay, what can I do to make myself feel better, to get more comfortable at home? And those are probably some of the habits that you started forming right away when you started working, right. So habits are a way for our minds to be able to work and not have to work so hard, if that makes sense.

Speaker 1: 2:23

I don't know if y'all have ever done this, but I have done this a few times where you get into the habit of going to a certain place in the morning let's say you go to work every morning, or you take your kids to school every morning. Maybe you go to the gym every morning, okay, and you are for a random day. You're doing something different for some reason. Maybe you're going on vacation, or maybe you're going out of town, or maybe you're. For some reason, your routine has changed, so maybe you start driving and, unintentionally and without thinking about it, you start heading in the direction that you always go, right.

Speaker 1: 3:04

I have had to turn around so many times when my mind kind of just shuts off a little bit and goes into that automatic drive of I'm going to go to work, but actually no, I'm not going to work today, I'm doing this other thing, right. So that's an example of a habit that's really well ingrained in you and it serves you. It makes it so that way each decision isn't a difficult one. Now, if you think back to when you were first like learning about how to drive or learning about how to get to your job, like you were having to follow GPS or something like that you will have to make specific decisions, like you have to decide okay, what time am I going to leave for work? What direction am I going? You're going to have to pay attention to the GPS as you're going. If you're like me, you might have to figure out where is my coffee shop on my way to work, right? So your brain has to work really hard, especially on those first few days of figuring out how to get somewhere, and then eventually it becomes automatic. So that's basically the habit, right, and the first part of the chapter really goes through that, about why our brain builds habits. And then he also talks about so if you're building habits, does that mean that you just turn into like this robot? And obviously I don't know if this is something that y'all have thought about or not, but in my opinion it's pretty obvious that a habit, as long as it's a good one, is building that automatic responses in there and giving your brain energy to work on other things, not on the little basic choices that you have. Okay, so the next thing, which I felt like was really the meat of the chapter, is talking about the science of habits, and he references another author in here.

Speaker 1: 5:06

Let's see the readers of the Power of Habit by Charles and I'm not even going to try to try to pronounce this person's name, duncan, maybe I guess I did try to pronounce it, anyway D-U-H-I-G-D. Charles, h-i-g-d. Charles. He builds this kind of structure around habits and so it starts off with cue, craving, response and reward. That is the science of a habit. So I'm going to show you this here. If you don't have the physical copy, you can see that that's the chart here Cue, craving, response and reward. So basically we go into why you are needing to be cued, and then there's a craving that you're trying to fill, and then the response is you doing whatever it is that you need to do, whatever habit you're trying to form, and then the reward, so whatever you get from doing that habit.

Speaker 1: 6:13

So one example that I found that I was very intentional on setting a habit I wanted to start going to the gym on a regular basis. So, following this structure, the first time that I read this book I did this. So my structure was for me. I actually kind of rewarded myself two times, because going to the gym is, for me, very difficult. It takes a lot of motivation. So my gym was right next to the coffee shop that I went to when I lived in a different city. So what I would do is I would go drop my kids off at school, then I would go get a coffee from my favorite coffee shop and then, right after getting that coffee, I go straight into the gym. I so I would get my craving of my coffee and also craving of wanting to get healthier Excuse me and then I would work out, and then after that I would let myself tan, because I want to be tan and very pale, and so I would let myself tan for five minutes and that was my reward. So my cue was going to get my coffee. My craving was that I wanted to be healthy and I wanted caffeine, so I would serve both of those things by going to the gym. My response working out, and then my reward was being able to tan and also get healthy at the same time. The reward is the satisfaction of having it be complete. So now there's another part in this book.

Speaker 1: 7:49

I know that he gets into more habit chaining, which is really interesting, but I have found that habit chaining is really really helpful. So if you have a habit already, basically what habit chaining is is linking a new habit that you want to build to an old habit you already have. So let's say you have the habit of brushing your teeth first thing in the morning and you want to build the habit of making your bed. So maybe you brush your teeth and then you go make your bed right after you brush your teeth, and then every day that's how you do it and eventually it becomes a habit because you're chaining that habit into the habit that you already have. So the cue for this in a habit chaining picture would be brushing your teeth. Right, the cue is brushing your teeth. The craving is that you want to have a clean space to come home to right. Your response making your bed. The reward the bed's made.

Speaker 1: 8:46

So the other thing that he really gets into I mean he doesn't really get into it, but he touches on it a little bit is the idea of needing to have an immediate reward for a habit. And I have found that whenever I have given myself an immediate reward for a habit that I'm trying to build, I am way more likely to keep doing it. And so you like ask yourself what kind of reward can I give myself every day for doing this? And it may not be something like what I had set up where I was going to the gym and then I would tan after, especially if you're trying to build multiple habits, right? It's just unrealistic. If I have 10 or so habits that I'm trying to build, I can't reward myself. I'd be rewarding myself every 10 minutes, depending on what kind of habits we're talking about, right, and so these things can be really simple rewards.

Speaker 1: 9:50

One thing that I have noticed for myself is I'm a very much a check off the list kind of girl. I really like having the visual aspect of writing something down and checking it off of my list. So I have an app that I'll link in the show notes that I use and I have these habits that I'm trying to build. It's a big mixture mixture of like doing things for my business, doing things for my personal life a big, big mixture, right. And what I really like about this app is that I can go through and check it off my list and then the next day it regenerates. So when you're putting in the habits, you can select do you want this habit to be every day, once a week or whatever? And then you can hat set reminders. Also, I'm not going to go into it, I'm not trying to promote the app, but for me that's been really helpful is being able to check things off a list.

Speaker 1: 10:49

So where, where, whether you decide to do an app or you decide to write things down, that can be really helpful in building your habits and giving you that instant reward. Okay, so the other thing that you can do and this app also helps with that is that it tracks how often you're actually building these habits and so you can reward yourself in other ways. So let's say you are, you want to build a habit of running every day? Okay, and you're going to give yourself a new pair of running shoes for every 30 days that you run, or every 60 days, whatever you decide, right? So as you're marking off that habit every day as you run, you're getting the instant gratification of marking off the habit, and then you're also getting that reward of the new tennis shoes at the end of the habit. Well, not the end of the habit, but at a mile marker is a better word for the habit.

Speaker 1: 11:59

One thing that I found really interesting that was helpful for a lot of people that I have talked to, is having some kind of picture chart and filling it in. So when I was really heavily involved in the Dave Ramsey community, they talked about how people would have these pictures of, like, their car and they would break it off into puzzle pieces and then, as they paid off you know every $100, they got to color in a piece of that puzzle piece and then at the end, when it was completely paid off, they would have the picture of it colored. So that's kind of one of those like really easy instant gratification things. It doesn't have to be big, it just has to be something that's going to like trigger that hormone in your body to realize that like reward centers being completed. So that's something that you really want to think about when you're looking at your habits.

Speaker 1: 12:57

Okay, so I'm not going to dig much deeper into this. Like I said, it was a really, really simple chapter. It looks like, when I'm looking at the pages, we have like 13 pages on this chapter. So it's short and sweet. We covered the basics. I talked almost as long, as the audiobook version was about 18 minutes, I think I hope y'all are having an awesome day and I'm going to try my best to get back on here here in the next week to do the next chapter. God bless, thank you.