A Beginner's Guide To Happy Habits

By Brett Brooks

Do You Want to Boost Your Productivity and Happiness Today?

If you answered "Yes", I have something helpful and thrilling to share with you, so please read on…

The journey to healthy habits can be a tough road to take. Whether you are trying to break a bad habit or simply trying to build a new one both are very challenging. We look for guidance to break or build habits but usually find a science lesson. We search for strategies but find it hard to find the one for us. Sometimes we need an inspirational story from someone who went through the same difficulties that we are facing right now to motivate us without reading an autobiography.

Once we find that guide that meets our needs and we start mastering our good habits something amazing starts to happen. Our new mastered habits let us ride those habits on autopilot, by not thinking but just doing them, allowing us to save energy.

In studies by neurobiologists, cognitive psychologists, and others, it has been found that between 40% and 95% of human behavior-what we say, what we think, and our overall actions-is habitual. By selecting a conservative 50%. These studies by scientists have proven that habits are the greatest source of energy savings.

You Will Discover Strategies That Will Assist You in Maintaining Good Habits Every Day.

Here is just a glimpse of what's inside:

• The reasons you get overwhelmed
• Benefits to healthy habits
• Bad habits could be linked to something else
• Putting this little amount of effort out a day leads to happy habits
• Change your habit but not this
• How to avoid setbacks
• What are the essential tools to keep you going on your journey
• Why positivity is important to make your healthy habits stick
• Discover the secrets of the mega-successful elites
• Much, much more!

It's not easy to make healthy habits stick, but with this beginner's guide, you'll be more prepared than ever.

It's not too late to change! This book will help you quit those unhealthy habits with strategies that fit your needs. This book will give you inspirational stories of others' successes to keep you going. Each chapter will keep you inspired and motivated to complete your journey to happy habits. This book covers different topics of habits but will never leave you bored. This is not a habit textbook. It's great for beginners not looking for complex solutions but looking for simple and ready-to-start right now strategies.

"It's not about who you are today, it's about who you want to become and the price you are willing to pay to get there."
                                                            ―Tom Bilyeu, Founder Impact Theory

All that you need in one place! This book has everything you need in order to take control of your habits. It is both inspiring and informative. For anyone looking to change their life for the better, this book is a must-have. "A Beginner's Guide to Happy Habits" is a book about how to take control of your life by changing your habits. You deserve to be happy, and this book will show you how.

Interested?
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• Language: English
• Publisher: Brett Brooks
• Release date: Dec 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201457280

Book preview

Introduction

There’s something wrong with me, I told my therapist. I struggle to commit to my plans.

Is that so? she responded. Give me an example.

Well, for one, whenever I tell myself that I’m going to get home and do house chores, I find myself gravitating toward the couch where I’ll spend the next few hours binging on a Netflix series!

She started scribbling notes on her board while looking up at me and back at her notes. My heart rate accelerated. I wondered what I’d said to her that warranted so many notes. Eventually, with a gentle voice, she looked me in the eyes and said:

Brett, I’m afraid you don’t have an issue with committing to your plans because you are able to commit to watching TV for hours after work. From my understanding, it looks like you have an issue committing to the right plans.

It was at that moment where I had my aha moment—the moment where my vision became clearer, and I was able to gain perspective about my situation. Never before had I imagined that my bad habit of binging on a series after work was a form of commitment. It was a habit, just like any other habit, and to some extent, it felt rewarding. Even though I knew deep down that my series binging wasn’t a productive way to use my time, it was nevertheless a relaxing exercise that helped me unwind after a busy workday.

No one likes the idea of being committed to bad habits. If it were up to us, we would only invest in healthy habits that lead us to our dreams. However, we cannot escape falling into bad habits due to the short-term gratification they provide for us. I remember during my college days when I would sometimes put off studying for my tests. Like many college kids, I believed I was smart enough to get good grades with minimal effort. I would procrastinate studying until days before the test, and guess what? My results would reflect the minimal effort I invested.

Whether we admit it or not, we all have a few bad habits we are constantly fighting. After successfully getting one under control, another one creeps up out of nowhere. It can feel like a juggling act maintaining healthy habits in different areas of our lives, and it’s normal for us to drop a few balls sometimes. The only habits that are instinctive for human beings are survival habits, like eating, sleeping, and staying away from danger. The rest we must develop on our own accord by regularly making choices with positive benefits. We need to be conscious about what exactly we commit ourselves to and the big why behind our behaviors.

In this uplifting book, you will learn how to commit yourself to happy habits. The definition of happiness is the feeling of enjoyment or pleasure because of your life. Take a moment and think about what happiness is in various areas of your life; what would your career, health, and relationships look like? Now, imagine that you adopted the mindset, attitudes, and behaviors to help you achieve that happiness. After reading this book, you will be equipped with the strategies to replace bad habits with happy ones, and regain a sense of control over your behaviors. Essentially, the skills you learn in this book can be applied when adjusting and creating habits in any area of your life.

The strategies presented in this book helped me get a grip on my habits and adjust them according to the lifestyle I desired. They helped me understand that I’m the master of my mind and not the other way around. What I feed my mind is what ends up becoming the basis of my beliefs, thoughts, emotions, and actions. Therefore, I’m a lot more aware of what goes into my mind, so I can determine my positive life outcomes.

Do you need a positive shift in your life? I guarantee you it’s possible. However, only you can bring about the kind of change that you need. Adjusting your habits can be the new beginnings you have always desired. Here’s to an inspiring journey of personal growth ahead!

Chapter 1: Habits—What You Need to Know

In essence, if we want to direct our lives, we must take control of our consistent actions. It's not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives, but what we do consistently.

—Tony Robbins

What Are Habits?

Without even knowing you, I can make some assumptions about your life. If you are reading this book, I can assume that you are breathing and blinking your eyes. I can also assume that you woke up this morning, brushed your teeth, and fixed yourself breakfast. The only reason why I can make these assumptions is because I perform similar behaviors—and so do most people in the Western world. While culture has a lot to do with why we behave this way, it’s primarily due to our conditioned habits.

If I could define habits in the simplest way possible, I would define them as automatic behaviors. They are learned patterns that are stored in your brain and triggered whenever your brain detects a familiar reaction or stimuli in your environment. It’s part of your brain’s nature to form habits because it cannot hold on to every piece of information it receives in each split second. In other words, habits are recorded patterns that your brain has memorized so that they can play out even when you are not aware of them.

Multiple studies have shown that about 40% of an individual’s daily activities are performed in the same way each day. This can even go down to which hand you use to eat your cereal in the morning or which route you take to work. The habitual behaviors you form are learned through what is known as associative learning. In essence, you look for behaviors that can help you achieve a desired outcome; then, you repeat whatever works and discard what doesn’t feel right. When your actions are repeated over and over again, your brain creates associations between the cues (the motivation that drives you to perform a specific action) and the responses (the actual learned behavior).

The brain’s mental processes also have a lot to do with how habits emerge. For instance, when you learn a specific response to a situation, you engage your basal ganglia. The basal ganglia are a set of brain cells that are connected to the prefrontal cortex. They are instrumental in helping you learn procedures, routines, and behaviors. As you repeat the response regularly, the information is reengineered in your brain. It changes from goal-directed information to become contextual cue responses.

For example, you might decide to drop a few pounds of weight by making a habit of going to the gym. The first few times you go to the gym, the information will be recorded as goal-directed behavior. Your consistency in going to the gym would eventually cause your brain to reorganize the information from goal-directed behavior to behavior that is triggered by specific cues, such as the time of the day, day of the week, certain emotions associated with going to the gym, and so on. This means that even though your habit of going to the gym started off as a means of achieving weight loss, it becomes more of a rigid behavior that is strictly based on certain cues.

How Habits Work

It is believed that 70% of what we do is automated (Kelly, 2012). This makes it that much more important for us to learn what habits are and how they are formed. It’s not enough for us to dismiss certain behaviors as being part of our personalities or a result of our past experiences. If the majority of what we do is automated, we must learn how to get behind our habits, so we can change any undesirable behaviors we notice. Neuroscientists who study habit formation have discovered a three-step process that explains how habits work, as well as how they can be changed. This three-step process was discussed at length in Charles Duhigg’s book, The Power of Habits (2012).

The process of habit formation consists of a cue, routine, and reward:

The Cue

In order for any action to occur, it must be triggered. The trigger, which is known as the cue, is what informs your behavior. It tells you how to react to certain situations. Cues are not necessarily good or bad. They are simply physical or psychological signals that lead to certain behaviors. For instance, when you hear your stomach rumbling, you are triggered to walk over to the kitchen and grab something to eat. Or when you think about a loved one, you are triggered to pick up the phone and call them. While cues are neither good nor bad, they can help you create good or bad habits. An example of this would be feeling the need to unwind (the cue), so you open a packet of cigarettes and light one up (the response). In this scenario, the cue isn’t good or bad, but the response to it is unhealthy.

One of the ways to break a bad habit is to identify the cue that drives it. This isn’t always easy since cues come in different forms. You can have cues that are based on location, time