​How to Create Habits that Help Simplify Your Life

Image by Jan Vašek from Pixabay

by Susan McCarthy
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When you’re thinking of simplifying your life, chances are that you think of the big things – decluttering unwanted and unnecessary items from your home; backing out of committees and meetings that you realize don’t connect with your values; and even saying “no” to negative relationships that drain your energy.

What you may not think of when simplifying your life is adding habits. Your first reaction to the word habits may be feelings of restriction and boredom. However, habits allow you to simplify decision-making in many necessary areas of your life that support the greater goals you have for your life.
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Choosing the right habits can make it easier to do the types of things that allow you to keep your home organized, your body energized, and your schedule purposeful instead of busily unproductive. This is one of those counterintuitive areas where planning to do more can help to create a simpler, calmer life with time for the activities, people, and experiences important to you.
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What Is a Habit?

A habit automates an action. This can be something that happens intentionally or unintentionally. Chances are that you put more emphasis on your bad habits while overlooking the good habits you’ve established.

And while you may feel that habits just “happen” you can create habits when you understand what they are made of.

• Charles Duhigg, in his book The Power of Habit, identifies a habit as a cue > routine > reward.
• James Clear, in Atomic Habits, identifies habits as  a cue > craving > response > reward.
• And BJ Fogg, in Tiny Habits, sees behavior as a process of anchoring moment > tiny behavior > instant celebration.

All habits start with a cue or prompt to action. This could be simple, like walking in the front door, turning on the tea kettle, or noticing that it’s 3 o’clock-ish. When Fogg refers to anchoring moments, he’s reminding us that these simple actions can be deliberately identified and chosen to start off a habit.

When Clear adds “craving” to his description, he’s talking about our motivation to engage in a habitual action. Because Fogg describes how to design habits, he asks us to figure out how motivated we are to develop a habit before we start forcing ourselves to practice the behavior.

The reward for the habit isn’t physical (the snack you grab as part of your Netflix routine or seeing the number of steps you took on your daily walk), but the feeling you experience for going through the habit. That snack may be part of a feeling of relaxation while the number of steps that show on your fitness tracker give you a sense of accomplishment.

Whether you refer to your habit as good or bad, it’s providing you with a feeling that’s encouraging you to repeat that behavior. Even if you refer to snacking as a bad habit, you’re still experiencing a positive emotion when you do that action.
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​How to Stop a Habit

There’s no big guidebook out there that offers the one right way to stop a habit. So, let’s say you want to encourage everyone in your house to stop leaving the bags, bowls, cups, and cans associated with snacking and sitting in front of the television strewn over the room.

Telling everyone to stop this behavior probably won’t work. And if you ask each person why they do this, they might not know. If you’re choosing your battles, and this situation really bothers you, you may have to do some problem-solving…and realize that the method that works for one person might not work for someone else.

First, consider if you can remove the prompt to snack in this space. This might not be possible, so if you can’t think of any ideas, move onto the next technique.

Next, contemplate making the habit harder to do. This could involve unplugging the cable box or not buying any snack food, so no one is sitting in the room and snacking. Come up with a list of ideas without censoring yourself. Include some, “I could never do that” ideas because once they’re on paper, you may see ways to tone them down.
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Finally, think of ways to reduce motivation (stop making it rewarding to get up and leave the mess) or motivate people to do what you want – clean up and put their trash and dirty dishes in the kitchen. Maybe the consequence is that each item you must pick up results in that number of minutes being shaved off viewing or gaming time. Maybe you need to explain what you mean by “cleaning up.” What seems obvious to you may elude others.
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Select the Habits that Will Work for You ​

When creating a habit, you want it to be something you (and others at home, if applicable) can carry out as well as are motivated to do. You also want it to be effective at helping you attain your aspirations. If you want coats hung up by the door instead of tossed over the back of a chair in the kitchen or living room, you want to know why this is important to your goals and how the new habit will support your goals.

One. Define your aspiration. This doesn’t have to be as specific as a goal (declutter the kitchen by February 10th) but reflects the desired result. Some ideas – sleep better, keep the house tidy, read more, and so on.

Two. List ten or more behaviors that would help you with this aspiration. Don’t edit your ideas just because you think you wouldn’t do that action. If you want to read more, this could include ideas like subscribe to Audible, get a library card, stop at the library Fridays after work, read for fifteen minutes in the morning, go to bed 15 minutes early and read, join a book club, create a book club, make a ‘to read’ list, give up any book that doesn’t interest you by the end of the first chapter so you’ll stay motivated to read, pick a genre or author or nonfiction topic to get immersed in, make a list of books to read, read at a coffee shop, get an e-Reader.

Three. Using Fogg’s method, write each action on a small piece of paper. Next, divide a piece of printer or notebook paper evenly into four sections. Label the top of the page, “high-impact behaviors” and the bottom of the page, “low-impact behaviors. Take the small pieces of paper and rank them along the vertical line as to the impact each behavior will make on your aspirations.

Four. Label the horizontal line, “no” on the left-hand side of the page and “yes” on the right-hand side. You’ll now slide each piece of paper listing a behavior to the left or right, based on whether you can see yourself doing this action.

Five. You’ll have little pieces of paper across this four-quadrant chart. The behaviors that are likelier to work for you are those in the upper right-hand corner because you’ve identified them as things you’d do as well as behaviors that would make the most impact for this aspiration.

Six. Identify when you could try one of these new habits. It’s most effective if you can link the new habit to an action you already do. For example, after turning on the coffee to brew, you list three things you are grateful for; after flushing the toilet, you do two pushups against the wall; after taking off your coat, you hang it on the hook.
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Make certain that the actions you’re linking occur near one another, so you aren’t dashing through the house to follow one habit with another.
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Experiment to Find the Best Behaviors

If after a few tries with your chosen habit, it doesn’t seem to be a good match, try one of your other ideas. It’s easier to fit in small actions that are easy to do than habits that demand a lot of action in the beginning (start small and allow them to grow).

To go back to the family’s habit of leaving plates and cups where they watch television and game, maybe the first move is to get them used to corralling the mess on a tray.

When this becomes a habit, you could add in the action of someone carrying the tray into the kitchen and leaving it on the counter. Step-by-step, you’ll get them used to cleaning up the living room and putting the items in the dishwasher or trash.
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Each small action is progress. While this may seem like a lot of effort to simplify different aspects of your life, remember that you are making long-lasting changes one habit at a time.

​Get my free guide, Live a Less Cluttered Life, and start clearing clutter and distractions from your life, today.
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