Starting a new habit is always a challenge but the first step is to decide that you actually want to change your life and need to build new habits in order to do so. I successfully introduced a few new habits into my life and keep improving my lifestyle every single day. And I can’t wait to share my tips with you!
Changing your lifestyle is hard and I truly believe that you deserve less stress during this period especially when you build new habits.
My story
I have been struggling to implement a few important habits for some time. But after millions of trials, I finally came up with a system that works for me. Changing your life, lifestyle or routine isn’t a one-time thing, you need to show up every day, you have to be persistent and you need to remember that it is a journey.
Over the past 6 months I successfully introduced the following habits into my life:
- Taking a cold shower every evening
- Applying face, eye, and body cream every evening
- Journaling every day
- Meditation – one of my new habits
- Drinking 1,5-2 liters of water every day
- Exercising 3 times a week – my most recent habit
Here are my 6 tips on how to build new habits and improve your life.
How to build new habits?
1| Know your goal
It is important to know what you want and what is your ultimate goal. Write down your goals, no more than 3, and how you plan to achieve them. A good thing can be to write down why you actually decided to change your lifestyle or what motivated you. In the hard moments, you can always come back to this plan in order to motivate yourself. It is your reminder of why you do what you do.
In the free workbook that you can download at the end of this blog post, I made a page for setting your goals. There you can write down your three main goals and the plan for achieving them as well as what is your main motivation
2| Quality over quantity
Choose a few habits that correspond with the goals you want to achieve. Overwhelming yourself with too many changes can cause unnecessary stress and you will get tired and uninspired pretty quickly. When I decided that I need to take care of my body, I picked 2 habits – cold showers and using body lotions and worked on these habits for a few months until they became a part of my daily routine.
In the workbook, you can write down all the habits you want to build and highlight the most important ones that resonate with your goals. I would highly suggest to chose one to three habits per goal depending on how busy your life is.
3| Step by step
As I said before, this is your journey, and every day you get a chance to take another step toward your goal of building new habits and a better lifestyle. I truly believe that it is better to take smaller steps every day than to jump or make a few big steps and to never move again.
The thing is, in the beginning, we are always motivated and have so much inspiration, and if we don’t use this energy in a smart way there is a possibility to burn out very fast and to lose motivation for a very long time. Repeat this every day as your mantra “step by step, day by day“.
4| Don’t be harsh on yourself
You will most likely forget to work out or will be too tired or too busy to prepare healthy meals in advance and it is totally fine. Of course, in order to build new habits you have to be persistent but this is life and shit happens. Forgive yourself and allow yourself to fail or as I call it to have relaxing days. Don’t judge yourself, focus on what you can do today and what your plan for tomorrow will be. You didn’t read 10 pages as you promised yourself? Guess what, tomorrow you can read 20!
5| Have realistic expectations
It is important to set not only realistic goals but also realistic expectations for yourself. Wanting to become better is normal but to have too high expectations for yourself means automatically setting yourself for a failure. If you have a busy schedule and can not commit to working out or reading every single day, don’t do it every day. Choose a few days a week or a month and stick to it. If you physically can’t drink a gallon of water a day, don’t expect yourself do to so.
I had so many high expectations for myself and when I didn’t achieve certain goals or chose other paths, I felt like I was failing and it influenced my confidence to the level that I gave up on myself, my dreams, my goals. I don’t want this to happen to you. So it is better to start small and grow over time in order to build new habits and a new lifestyle. Step by step, honey!
6| Tools to support you
I would highly recommend downloading any tracking app such as HabitBull or Daylio. I have experience with both of these apps but my favorite is Daylio because you can track not only your goals but also your moods and activities.
I use Daylio every single day and it is the best app so far that helped me to build new habits. I use it on my Android and not iPhone because it’s a one-time purchase on Android and on iPhone, you have to pay for it either monthly or yearly, however, there is also a free limited version.
Another way to track your habits is a good ol’ journal. You can make a tracker in your bullet journal or you can download a free workbook I made to help you with building new habits. There I included a 7-day tracker in two sizes
DOWNLOAD A FREE PRINTABLE
Download the workbooks to help you to build new habits now. Simply click on the image below 🤍
Watch my YouTube video about habits
Read more:
- Reclaiming myself. 5 things I learned
- Tips on setting realistic expectations for yourself
- 10 things I do to improve my lifestyle
Tips on setting realistic expectations for yourself
8 ways to practice meditation now
Make 2022 Your Most Memorable Year Ever
