Change Any Habit: Creating a Ritual For Success

November 29, 2007

One of the most commonly asked questions in the world of personal development is how people can change their bad habits into good habits. They are always looking for a shortcut, an easy way out. The idea of practicing their self discipline over and over just isn’t a happy one. They want a quick and dirty tip for getting from where they are, to where they want to be. Well, you know how I feel about short cuts, but what I’m going to tell you is about the closest I’ll ever come to a quick and dirty tip to a better you. If you want to put a stop to your less desirable habits and put your shoulder into creating better, more productive habits, keep reading. Trust me when I say that this will be easier than you ever thought possible.

The Creature from the Habit Lagoon

There is no better way to describe the human animal than as a creature of habit. We create habits for ourselves because it is the most efficient way to live our lives. If we didn’t have a system for our small and seemingly insignificant tasks, we would waste incredible amounts of time and energy deciding when and how to do something as simple as sleep. Instead of allowing these types of tasks to be regulated by the whim of the conscious mind, we’ve evolved to create patterns, or programs, that will take over and decide these things for us. You witnessed this in your own life numerous times. The more you consistently go to sleep at the same time every night, the more you will consistently feel sleepy at that time. Your body generates automated programs to run most of its functions and the basis of these programs is whatever has come before. The more you sleep at the same time, the more likely you are to sleep at that time and the harder it will become not to.

This is actually the nature of addiction and, I believe, the more pressing of the factors that make addictions so hard to break. When you consistently respond to a stimulus in a certain way, the harder it will become to stop responding in that same way. When you feel the itch in the back of your head that tells you that you want a cigarette, you go out for a smoke. The more you respond to this itch by smoking the more your brain trains itself to act in this way. So on the day you decide not to smoke anymore, the difficulty comes ? not so much from the addictive properties of nicotine ? but from your ingrained need to complete your routine. There is no doubt that nicotine is addictive, but I think your own reaction to previous stimuli holds more power over you than a chemical dependency. You’ve felt the stimulus and now you need a cigarette to complete the habit. Without it you feel incomplete and, more to the point, you feel physically terrible. This will not be the case with harder drugs, but weaker dependencies like caffeine and nicotine will be ruled more by human born habits than chemicals. The habit of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day is the same as any other habit, it just has the virtue of being a habit that can be reinforced or ?anchored? more than twenty times during the course of a day. A habit that strong has a powerful momentum to get beyond.

What we want to do is create a habit for success that is this strong. Does this mean you’ll have to reinforce it twenty or more times a day? If you can, yes, that would be ideal, but let’s try for five to ten.

Drop the Anchor, We’ve Spotted Success!

Anchoring is nothing new, when Pavlov rang a bell and dropped some food, he was anchoring a habit of salivating on cue into his canine test subjects. This is what you need to do to yourself. When you start thinking about the habits you have now, you’ll see that you’ve anchored them without knowing it. Let’s say that when you are unhappy, you crave chocolate. This is an anchored response. You’ve taught your body that when it feels the stimulus of unhappiness, the hunched shoulders, the emptiness in the stomach, that it should respond by desiring chocolate. If you workout in the gym everyday while listening to the same music, you’ll begin to find that hearing that same music at any other time will illicit the same biological responses of getting you pumped up and ready to work. When I was a kid I anchored terrible feelings to a song that haunts me to this day and funny thing is that I never meant to do it.

When I was just starting high school, I had an alarm that allowed me to play a song to wake me up. I choose an upbeat song that I thought would get me excited every morning. Well, after a few weeks of waking up feeling exhausted and horrible, all the while listening to that song, I began to realize that hearing that song at any other time during the day caused me to feel exhausted and unhappy. If you’ve ever wondered why you hate the sound of your alarm clock, this is why. All I had to do was change the song and I changed the stimulus, but to this day I can’t hear that song without calling up the same old responses. I cringe every time I hear that song, even years later.

This type of anchoring is what you need to do to create a new habit for yourself, you just need to be more careful about what you anchor than I was. Let’s say that you hate meeting new people, you get nervous and don’t know what to say. This happens because over the years you have anchored feelings of fear and discomfort with the stimuli of meeting new people. To correct this problem, we simply have to create a new response to the same stimulus.

The Steps to Anchoring New Habit:

1.Imagine the Reaction You Want to Have: start by imagining a time when you were calm, cool and collected, when you met someone new and didn’t feel nervous you felt in control and interesting. Imagine, in the greatest detail possible a time when you felt just the way you wish to feel. If you’ve never experienced it, then pretend, make up a time when this happened to you and create the images and feelings with as much detail as possible. It is very important that you physically feel the sensations of you desired habit because it is that physicality that you are going to anchor. When you feel that these sensations have reached their height and are as strong as they can be, move on to the next step.

2.Pick an Anchor: in the case of meeting someone new, I would suggest you get a friend to help you with anchoring your habit. The anchor, or the trigger, is the stimulus that will illicit your new, desired responses. At the moment, you have anchored meeting someone new with feelings of nervousness and self consciousness. Now you must anchor meeting new people with feelings of confidence and ease.

I would suggest using a handshake and you saying a firm ?Hello? as your anchor. This way every time you shake someone’s hand and say ?Hello? in that certain way, you will create the same feelings of confidence. No matter what anchor you choose, or who you have to help you, try to create your anchor by combining at least two sensations. Use two or more of your senses as this will make the anchor stronger. Combine a smell and a touch, a sound and touch, a sound and a taste. These will engage more of your brain and body in the anchoring process. This is why I suggest a handshake(touch) and you saying ?Hello?(sound). Not only is this a trigger that you will encounter in everyday life, but it also engages two of your senses at once. Remember that we are trying to anchor emotional responses through physical stimuli.

A Note on Anchors: Your anchors must be the same every time; consistency is key in this process. When you shake hands and say hello, you must shake hands the same way every time and say hello with the same tone and inflection. This won’t be so important once your habit has been properly anchored but, while you are creating this habit, consistency is the most important thing to remember. Anchor it the same way every single time, you patience will be rewarded.

3.Lather, Rinse, Repeat: Do this over and over again as many times as you can stand it. The more you consistently anchor your emotions with your triggers, the more quickly you’ll see the results. Stand with your friend and imagine meeting someone new for the first time. Imagine feeling confident and calm, imagine feeling interesting and charming. When you feel these emotions in your body reach their peak, confidently stretch out your hand, shake you partner’s and say ?Hello.? Repeat the process until you begin to feel the emotional effects come more easily. And don’t be shy about testing it out to see how you’re doing. Let your practice rest for a day or so, then just try shaking someones hand and saying your practiced ?Hello.? You’ll find that even after only a few short practice sessions, you’ll begin to feel the new sensations taking hold. And the more you practice the stronger the habit will become, until you no longer need to even think about it. Your reaction will become perfectly natural.

I’ll talk more about anchoring and how you can more easily put it to use in your life in my next update. For now, I hope you will try the system I’ve outlined above. It seems deceptively simple because it is such a short process but I guarantee it’s effectiveness. Try it yourself for just a day and you’ll begin to feel its potential to change your life. Until the next update, enjoy this clip from Mind Control with Derren Brown in which he anchors the effects of alcohol with an actual drink. Say what you will about the reality of the trick, but watch closely the anchoring techniques Derren uses such as the repetition of physical sensations, repeatedly touching the subject and an anchor word. Until next time . . .