2025 All over again! Establish a "habit loop" to naturally form a routine and achieve New Year's goals

The beginning of a year always brings hope, wanting to shake off the bad past and start over. With such enthusiasm, various goals were set: to save money, to control diet, to exercise every day, to work more efficiently... These new wishes seemed to have appeared last year.

Why do wishes appear over and over again but never come true year after year? The reason is that existing lifestyles have formed inertia, and these inertias are the biggest resistance to change. On the other hand, if you want to change yourself, developing new habits is the best way.

Before changing your habits in the new year, think about "who you want to be"

"Atomic Habits" states that a habit is a behavior that is repeated often enough to become automatic. Before changing your habits, you must first think about "who you want to be," because only behaviors that are consistent with your identity can last.

Take smoking cessation as an example. A and B are two ex-smokers. When someone hands them a cigarette, A says, "No, thank you. I'm quitting smoking." (He thinks he is still a smoker and just wants to change his behavior.) B says, "No, thank you." Yes, thank you. I don't smoke." (Don't consider yourself a smoker. Smoking is a thing of the past and has nothing to do with the present.)

The above example points out a blind spot of most people. Many people do not consider "changing their identity" when they start to improve. They always think "I want to lose weight (result), as long as I implement this exercise or diet method, I will lose weight (process)" without ever thinking about the belief that drives the action. If you want to lose weight, you should first consider yourself a thin person. When you eat, you will naturally eat light and moderate amounts.

Establish a habit loop, naturally develop good habits and change your life

Simply put it can be summarized as:

1. Alert: A message that prompts the brain to start a behavior, such as seeing a guitar and picking it up to play.
2. Desire: The driving force of habits. Without desire, there is no reason to act.
3. Response: When we perform a habit, we have thoughts or behaviors that respond to the good or bad feelings that the habit brings. For example, you want to dunk, but you can't hit the rim when you jump, so practicing dunking is full of frustration. Habits only work within your capabilities, which means if a behavior is too hard for you to do, you'll give up easily.
4. Reward or Punishment: Reward is the ultimate goal of every habit. The feedback mechanism of reward can satisfy desires, bring pleasure, and help the brain distinguish which behaviors are worth repeating in the future. On the contrary, punishment can help break bad habits.

The cycle formed by 4 steps is called the habit loop: the cue causes the craving, the craving triggers the response, the response provides the reward, the reward satisfies the craving, and finally the cue is connected. For example, your phone rings with a new message (alert). You want to know the content of the message (desire), so you pick up your phone and read the message (response) to satisfy the desire (reward). If every time you pick up your phone, you can satisfy your craving, the act of picking up your phone will be linked to the ringing of your phone.

To change behavior and build (or break) a habit, make the cue obvious, the habit attractive, the action easy, and the reward satisfying. "Atomic Habits" reminds you to choose habits that are easy for you to implement, and progress will be easy. Therefore, you must continue to explore and find behaviors that suit you, so that you can easily develop habits.

When developing and exploring different options, you can ask yourself 4 questions:

1. What is hard for others but fun for me?
2. What makes me forget the passage of time?
3. What rewards me more than the average person?
4. What do you do to feel alive?