There seems to be a common misconception that building good habits is extremely difficult to do. But shaping a daily routine is much simpler than most people think.
Within the modern western world, we often wish for immediate gratification. If we don’t receive results, we simply do not wish to put forth the effort into something that shows no value in return.
We are currently able to communicate with someone we love from the other side of the planet in a matter of seconds, but altering the way we operate on a daily basis takes time and continual effort? This result-oriented mentality becomes a very understandable response when one considers all of the components within the western world. However, more and more people are becoming aware of the fact that we need to change how we treat ourselves and our world.
With this in mind, building good habits for life simply means becoming more mindful of your internal and external environments, daily decisions, and pre-existing habits. It also means being honest with yourself on where your foundation truly is — if you don’t understand your foundation, then you will not be able to build an empire of your dreams without every brick crumbling.
You should be able to ask yourself without judging: Which of my habits are good? In this article, we will share some powerful examples of how good habits can be implemented into anyone’s daily routine.
What Are Good Habits?
- Good habits are the everyday decisions we make that help us build lives where we thrive;
- Patterns that better our overall health or well-being;
- And the positive influences we have on our environment based on the decisions we make (and our environment influences positively in return).
Be Honest With Yourself: Build Your TRUE Foundation
Being able to acknowledge and accept the stability of your current foundation will be crucial in the process of building a powerful pillar on top of it.
Ask yourself: What are my habits? What is my daily routine? Can I improve? Do I want to improve? What are good habits? What is it that I want to change and why do I want to change it? If we cannot answer the why behind how we feel, then we will not put in the work to rewire the feeling.
6 Important Examples Of Good Habits: Taking One Step At A Time
Mindfulness
Mindfulness is becoming more mindful or aware of where and what you’re focusing your attention on. Mindfulness can also be thought of as the thread that binds and connects every decision we make.
There are many ways to become more mindful of our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, emotions, fears, or habits but the principle beneath the surface is consistent through every option.
Listening. Becoming the silent observer of your environment who understands without judgment.
A great way to become more mindful and build good habits is to practice listening to your body, heart, thoughts, environment, and intuition to develop a better understanding of who YOU are and how YOU are influenced by your surroundings.
Nutrition
Nutrition is not about building an entirely different way of eating like most people think. Instead, diet is “everything you absorb and consume” — this includes television, media, relationships, influence, etc.
Becoming better able to determine or adjust where your nutrition comes from is another essential pillar for building good habits. It simply starts by swapping one unhealthy item for something with benefit. A cookie for an apple. Fast food for eggs and avocado. Soda pop for a kombucha.
Eventually, the ability to swap items and better understand the importance of eating will become conscious and easier to sort through. In order to reach this point, one must start the process of weaning out the weak within their dietary plans one by one and receiving the results every step of the way.
Relationships
Another powerful way to implement mindfulness into building good habits for life is to pay attention to how your relationships determine how you behave.
Ask yourself these questions:
- How is my environment influencing me?
- Are the people around me benefiting my well-being?
- Are they subconsciously contributing to my unhealthy behaviors?
Paying more and more attention to how we respond, the behaviors of those around us, and how they influence how we behave or respond is crucial for rerouting our behaviors and decision-making abilities.
Exercise
The best way to incorporate physical activity into your good habits is by adding activities little by little. Going for a walk, hiking, playing catch, doing yoga, or going to the gym 2, 3, or 4 times a week are great ways to implement a new element into your routine. By doing this, you will naturally learn more and more about what you should and should not be done by once again, making one move at a time.
In order to obtain growth, we have to start somewhere. Always.
Emotions
Building better habits within our emotional state of being are as simple as starting to acknowledge how we feel.
Happy? Sad? Anxious? Afraid? Angry? Hopeful?
This is another place where HONEST feedback and genuine communication with yourself becomes essential. Where are these emotions coming from? Me? My environment? The people around me?
Regardless of where they are coming from, they are being influenced and living within YOUR being. This is where we are better able to hone ourselves back into ourselves — by taking ownership of how WE are feeling and where WE go from there.
We cannot be afraid to feel how we feel. If we are afraid of feeling a feeling within ourselves, then we start rejecting and refusing to love a piece of our being. Thus, leading to unhealthy patterns and the inability to produce good habits.
Meditation
Many people think meditation is doing nothing at all, but in actuality, even doing nothing, is doing something.
Meditation can come in many forms of feeling or flow. Some are able to enter a meditative state through physical activity such as running, martial arts, competition, or dance. To others, meditation is entering the flow of one’s being and becoming more mindful of where they are through space and time with complete acceptance of being.
Meditation can be enhanced by spending 15 seconds watching your breath, paying attention to the people around you in traffic, cooking a meal, or even listening to a song that brings you into a new realm of being.
We are able to perceive through a meditative position for the entire duration of the moment, over and over again until our entire lives become one momentary meditation session. Stringing moment after moment of peaceful awareness within the now. Building better concentration, attunement, awareness, focus, bonding, appreciation, compassion, comprehension, or clarity through our moments of everyday living.
If you are looking for a fantastic guided meditation to start (or end) your day, here’s a highly recommended meditation by Vishen:
Overall Health
Obtaining the overall health of living is the essential goal when working to build good habits for life. Hopefully, these examples of good habits (mindfulness, nutrition, exercise, relationships, emotions, and meditation) and ways to improve them will help you build the next best version of yourself.
Asking ourselves honestly about what good habits are and how to build better patterns through my decisions will be essential when implementing new activities into a daily routine.
All it takes to build good habits is to make one better decision after another until your full way of performing alters into a brand-new way of living.
One. Step. At. A. Time.
