TINY HABITS

What are tiny daily habits? How that could be life changing?

What is a Habit?

Habits are routine behaviours done on a regular basis. They are recurrent and often unconscious patterns of behaviour and are acquired through frequent repetition. Many of these are unconscious as we don't even realise we are doing them.

But as a behaviour becomes a habit, as it becomes automatic, it moves into the basal ganglia, which is one of the oldest structures in our brain and it’s near the centre of our skull. And when things happen in the basal ganglia, it doesn’t feel like the thought. That’s why a habit feels automatic, is because it’s happening in this part of your brain that for all intents and purposes, from what we think of like thinking, is completely exempt from that process.

Psychology definition

A habit can also be thought of as a link between a stimulus and a response. It serves as a mental connection between a trigger thought or event (stimulus) and our response to that trigger (the response). Repeating this connection time and again forms a habit and affects all subsequent decisions and actions. If repeated often enough, this connection becomes near permanent unless we take conscious action to change it.

For example, a stimulus for overeating might be stress. The stress may be physical, emotional or mental and triggered by such things as a restricted diet, tiredness, an argument, a bad day at work or even negative thinking. A learned response for dealing with this stress may be eating. Over time, the bond may become so strong that our automatic or habitual response to stress is to eat. In psychology, this is known as classical conditioning, as demonstrated by Pavlov’s dogs. The dogs learnt to associate a tone with food and would salivate whenever they heard the tone whether there was food present or not.

In order to interrupt and eventually eliminate this negative behaviour, we must weaken the bond between the stimulus and the response, so it eventually it becomes ‘extinct.’ Hence, the technical name ‘extinction’ is rooted in this word.

What is the role of motivation?

Motivation plays a very important role in changing or making of a habit. In order to do something difficult you need a very high level of motivation, in fact, that's the purpose, that's the only use of motivation in our life, to allow users to do hard things, but if you are doing something easy you don't need that much level of motivation to push you to do it.

How would you trigger the new tiny habits that you have made?

If you use an existing behaviour in your life and you put the new tiny behaviour after it you can use the existing behaviour as a trigger for the new tiny behaviour.

For example: 

• Like after waking up in the morning(existing behaviour), the first thing that I will do is pray to God(new tiny behaviour).
• Before taking the shower(existing behaviour), I will do five push-ups(new tiny behaviour).

"Plant a tiny seed in the right spot and it will grow without coaxing."

Here are some tiny habits that you can try:

• Have gratitude
• Talk to one person you don't know once a day.
• Email or tweet one famous person once a day.
• Send one Email to the CEO of a local business once a day.
• Shoot an old friend a message about a memory you guys shared once a day.
• Ask someone something you don't think they will give you once a day.
• Reach out to one person on Instagram or any social media sites that lives a life you find interesting once a day.
• Look in the mirror in the morning and just laugh at yourself once a day.
• Set a timer for daily tasks so you do them faster.
• Watch one YouTube lecture on (History, Science, Economics, etc.) and take notes once a day.

You can add more habits according to your preference but never try to offend others by your habits.