00:00:00:12 - 00:00:27:15 Kate Hi. I'm Kate, and this is Psych for Life. Has this ever happened to you? You start a new habit, and for the first few days, you're doing great, and you're sticking to it. And then. Well, life happens. And then maybe you skip a day or you skip two days, and pretty soon you're back to your old ways. In this section, we're going to go through four tips that help you stay consistent and motivated so that new behavior becomes such a part of your routine. 00:00:27:26 - 00:00:55:26 Kate It's so automatic that you don't even need to think about it. In this section, we're going to discuss habit tracking, social accountability, motivation, and planning for the unexpected. Let's start with habit tracking. If you watched our video on habit formation, you know that we're much more likely to stick to a habit if we write down our intention for the time and place for us to perform the behavior. 00:00:56:18 - 00:01:17:23 Kate It turns out that writing things down can also help you stick to that new habit, even when life gets busy. Here's where our first tip comes in. It's called habit tracking, and it's really simple. All you need to do is take note of the days when you accomplish the habit that you want to be performing and take note on the days where you don't do it. 00:01:19:06 - 00:01:45:08 Kate Across 138 studies on a range of habits, including quitting smoking, eating healthier, and reducing consumption of alcohol People who are asked to track their habits were significantly more likely to improve and move toward their goals than those who did not track. Tracking helps you achieve your goals in three ways. It keeps you accountable to yourself. It helps you remember the intentions you set. 00:01:45:20 - 00:02:09:17 Kate It provides a visual representation of your progress, giving you a sense of progress and motivation to keep going. There are many ways to track your habits. You can simply mark your calendar when you perform the given habit. You can use a habit tracking app regardless of what habit tracking method you use. You want to use our habit forming technique to get in the habit of habit tracking. 00:02:10:01 - 00:02:23:09 Kate First, you want to keep your habit tracker accessible so you're making it easy for yourself. And second, you want to set up your situational cues to track your habit. That might be right after you perform it or when you go to bed at night. 00:02:25:19 - 00:02:49:07 Kate Tracking is also useful when you're trying to break a habit. So if you're trying to stop scrolling social media before bedtime, give yourself a checkmark every time you don't perform the habit. Habit tracking also allows you to find patterns and track your successes and your failures. So every few days you might want to pull out your habit tracker and look back over the week and ask yourself questions like What worked? 00:02:49:07 - 00:03:11:19 Kate Well, that allowed me to engage in the habit on these days, and how could I have improved these other days when the habit didn't occur? This allows you to tweak your habits so they fit your life to make yourself accountable to others. As people, we respond really well to support and encouragement and sometimes even a little bit of guilt from other people. 00:03:11:28 - 00:03:33:22 Kate We can use this to our advantage when forming habits by involving others in the process. You might want to ask your partner or a friend to be your accountability buddy so you can support each other on the habits you're trying to build. You can establish regular check ins and even make it fun by checking in on your habits on a Sunday morning brunch. 00:03:33:22 - 00:04:01:01 Kate Or a walk during the week for active habits such as exercise or studying. You might even plan to engage in the habit together so you're not only being each other's accountability partner, but you're providing the context cues for engaging in the habit. You can also join a social club that will help keep you accountable. For instance, if it's exercise you're interested in, maybe you join a weekend running club, or if you're trying to read more. 00:04:01:06 - 00:04:24:19 Kate Maybe you join a book club Not only does this provide the social support for engaging in the activity, but it also helps you make positive associations, new friendships and a new hobby. Research has shown that we look to others for cues for how to act. So when we surround ourselves with people who are engaging in the habit, it reinforces the idea that this is what people do. 00:04:25:18 - 00:04:51:20 Kate Three Make your habits fun and just challenging enough to be engaging. For instance, if you want to exercise but you hate running. Choose something fun. Maybe walking, dancing, rock climbing. Feel free to experiment and choose activities that meet your goal. But are also enjoyable. It turns out there are two factors that contribute to motivation seeing progress and sharing progress. 00:04:51:27 - 00:05:22:03 Kate They can significantly increase your chances of sticking to a habit long term. You can maintain your motivation by increasing the difficulty of the habit in small increments, so you stay engaged and challenged, but you don't increase the difficulty so much that you become overwhelmed or discouraged and for plan for the unexpected. Even with the best of intentions, it's inevitable that at some point you won't have the time or the energy, or you'll just miss a day of completing your habit. 00:05:22:24 - 00:05:49:02 Kate To ensure that you remain consistent despite these inevitable hiccups. It can be useful to just develop a plan of attack for when things go wrong. For example, let's say your plan is to exercise 30 minutes a day on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. You'd be wise to go ahead and set up a fourth day. That's your ketchup day. Let's say you get called in to a meeting one of the days in the week where a child is sick, so you can't complete your exercise that day. 00:05:49:11 - 00:06:17:27 Kate Having the fourth day gives you that backup plan for when these inevitable emergencies occur. Alternatively, when there isn't enough time to complete your full 30 minute workout, maybe you have a backup plan of jumping rope for 5 minutes. That way you haven't given up the habit entirely by planning ahead. You ensure that even when you fail to complete your habit, you haven't given up on it entirely because you know what the next steps are and exactly what to do. 00:06:19:18 - 00:06:46:28 Kate Here are our key takeaways for how to stick to your habits. One Track your habits to ask a friend to be your accountability partner or join a social club three. Make your habits fun and just challenging enough to be engaging and four plan for the unexpected Thanks for tuning in. Check out our next video on what to do when we get off track with our habits.