Wondering how to form good habits? You’ve come to the right place…

I used to be lazy and unmotivated. I always slept in, never exercised, and hardly ever ate healthy. That slowly began to change in 2017 when I took up a simple reading habit. In the years that followed, I’ve weaved good and healthy habits into my daily routine to create a disciplined life.

Aligning with these high-quality habits has become a cornerstone of not only my life but also my identity. The best part is that if I can make this shift, you can too. And in this post, I’m going to teach you how.

Keep reading to learn more.

What Are Habits?

Habits are the routines and rituals you perform on a daily basis.

But that’s only a surface-level definition. The truth is that habits are your foundation in this world; they are the psychological liferaft that keeps you afloat in life. And it’s the quality of our habits that will determine the quality of our outcomes and, ultimately, life.

For this reason, it’s crucial to learn how to form good habits.

Because here’s the deal: You can’t escape the consequences of your actions. Good habits produce good results; bad habits produce bad results. It’s a universal principle.

Strategies for Building Good Habits

When learning how to form good habits, it’s important to understand that no single method will work for everyone. You’ll resonate better with certain strategies over others; as a result, you have to do what works best for you.

Here are 6 simple strategies to help get you started.

1. Identify your motivation

If you want to know how to form good habits, you must first determine your motivation.

Your motivation is your fuel; it’s the reason why you want to make these changes in the first place. Without a compelling reason, no technique, hack, or strategy will be effective long term. As a result, it’s essential to nail this down.

And you may now want to hear this, but I have to say it anyway…

Your motivation has to come from you. I can’t tell you why you should do XYZ, and neither can anyone else. Only you can come up with the reasons that will feed your motivation to change.

So before you look for some “secret hack” or “little-known loophole” for behavior change, start with doing the internal work of answering the question: Why do you want to make these changes in the first place?

2. Use the Jerry Seinfeld Method

Jerry Seinfeld is one of the world’s most successful comedians.

Although I don’t find him particularly humorous, many other people do, and that’s evident from his massive fame and success. One way he developed his comedic skills was to write jokes every day.

The story goes like this…

Every day that he wrote a joke, Jerry would report to a calendar in his home, and with a marker in hand, he’d slash a giant “X” on the day he worked on his craft. Over time, the days in his calendar formed an unbroken chain of X’s.

This simple act helped build momentum, develop his skills, and make Jerry Seinfeld one of the most respected and well-known comedians in the world.

It’s called the “Don’t Break The Chain” method, and I use it myself.

You feel a sense of pride and accomplishment when you see those X’s add up on your calendar. As a result, this gives you a psychological boost. Why? Because you want to maintain your streak, and the longer your streak becomes, the more motivation you have to keep it going.

Try it yourself—it works. I swear.

3. Try the habit-stacking technique

James Clear, a habit and self-improvement expert, talks a lot about the concept of habit stacking.

This is essentially where you perform a certain number of habits sequentially, back to back. For example, you get up in the morning, eat breakfast, brush your teeth, jump in the shower, and then you’re off to work.

That is habit stacking; it’s systematically implementing a group of habits. It’s basically adding new habits on top of existing ones.

Habit stacking is powerful because it uses synaptic connections (the couplings where the neurons in your brain communicate with one another through electrical or chemical signals), which have been put under intense study over the years.

Best-selling author S.J. Scott, alongside James Clear, wrote extensively about habit stacking in his book, “Habit Stacking: 97 Small Life Changes That Take Five Minutes or Less.”

4. Download a habit tracker

I’ve been using a habit tracker for years, and it’s been a great tool for helping me stay on track with all my daily disciplines.

The best part is that you have many options (and a lot of them are free). You can review a list of both free and paid options here.  I personally use Habit – Daily Tracker. It’s simple, easy, and quick to get going.

However, if you want an app with a few more bells and whistles, you’ll have to find another one; the Daily Tracker is kind of a barebones app, but that’s how I like it.

5. Find accountability

An accountability partner can be a game-changer.

Gail Matthews (a Psychology Professor at the Dominican University of California) led a study in 2007. She gathered 267 participants to enter into randomized goal-setting experiments with certain conditions. The rules included that participants write down their goals and create an action plan for achieving them.

One group was asked to do all that and add one more action step: share their ambitions with a friend.

The study revealed that these participants became more likely to accomplish their goals. In fact, they nearly doubled their odds of achieving their ambitions just by asking a friend for accountability.

6. Make success easy

When it comes to how to form good habits, simplicity is key.

You want to go for the low-hanging fruit by making the habit as easy, fast, and efficient as possible. Why? Because if you make it too hard or complex, you’ll naturally feel overwhelmed by the new demands you’ve placed on yourself.

It can be a shock to your system if you haven’t built up to that standard slowly over time.

The classic example of this is the person wanting to get in shape. They decide to revolutionize their health by buying the gym membership, hiring the personal trainer, and getting all the expensive workout gear and supplements. Yet, they haven’t even done their first pushup.

See the problem here? It’s too much too soon.

Look, I’m all for tenacity. But I’m also a big believer in sustainability, and making that drastic of a shift that fast is not going to be sustainable for most people. So, take your strides in small, sensible steps until you’ve built the confidence to take the giant leap.

You gotta crawl before you can run.

Conclusion

Learning how to form good habits is a process, and you’re not going to get it right every time. That’s fine. The idea is to get a little better, bit by bit, rather than be immaculate—progress over perfection. This mindset will keep you striving and make it easier to bounce back when you fall short.

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