Why is celebration important in creating habits? I can personally vouch for Tiny Habits, Atomic Habits and Zen Habits methods of habit formation. They have worked for many many years in all of the areas of life – eating well, figuring out work, kids school, and everything in between. You can read about it here and then come back to read this post.
Emotions create habits.
BJ Fogg in his book Tiny Habits – The small changes that change every thing.
Oh and if you have already not picked up the book for reading, you can do that here. Tiny Habits – The small changes that change everything by BJ Fogg. Might be just the perfect present for yourself if you are trying to change any area of your life!
But I heard that repetition creates habits.
Maybe it does. When you are trying to wire in a new habit, it is perhaps the repetition for 21 days, 33 days, or 66 days that creates the habit. But more importantly, the question is how do you make the repetition itself automatic? That is where the celebration comes in. You create the habit by feeling good. And you can actually trick your gullible brain into feeling good in order to create the habit faster. Celebration makes the repetition automatic.
What happens when you take a bite of that chocolate chip cookie, or your favorite dessert or food? You feel good, and you want more of it.
Stronger the emotion of celebration, faster your brain rewires. There are many ways to celebrate. You might be the one that celebrates over-the-top happy dance, or one that celebrates with a fist bump or high five or a quiet YESSS!!
For your brain to rewire into doing the new habit, you have to do the celebration immediately after doing your habit. Essentially you are feeling the emotion right after the new habit. All habits form in this way – the good ones, or the bad ones!
So in my case, of trying to improve my writing here is the recipe I follow: After I make my morning tea, I will go to my office and open WordPress to write. And then I do a Fist Bump. <<thas my over-the-top celebration for just opening the WordPress. well now that I have WordPress open, I will do the writing. But the important part is I need to get into the habit of opening the WordPress at some point during the day!>>
Well now that I am up to my 79th day of writing, I do not need to celebrate anymore. So you can actually stop the celebration once your habit is fairly automated.
How do you celebrate when your favorite sport team wins?
Find your celebration.
And use it to create new habits. This year, for the first time you may actually succeed in keeping up with your new years resolutions!
If you are into that kind of thing, may I ask What was your New Years Resolution for 2021 and How is it going?
Jerry Seinfeld Experiment: Don’t break the chain. Post #79.
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