Quotes About Habits

Sorrow has the fortunate peculiarity that it preys upon itself. It dies of starvation. Since it is essentially an interruption of habits, it can be replaced by new habits. Constituting, as it does, a void, it is soon filled up by a real horror vacuum.

Good habits are formed; bad habits we fall into.

Earlier people used to switch on TV's after getting bored with their routine work. Now they switch on to routine work after getting bored with TV.

The hero is a device which the historian has taken over from the layman. He uses it because he has no scientific vocabulary or technique for dealing with the real facts of history-- the opinions, emotions, attitudes; the wishes, plans, schemes; the habits of men. He can't talk about them so he talks about heroes.

In order to design successful habits and change your behaviors, you should do three things. Stop judging yourself. Take your aspirations and break them down into tiny behaviors. Embrace mistakes as discoveries and use them to move forward.

This pressure leads to a scarcity mindset—we believe that there will never be enough time, so we say no to changes because we feel like we don't have the hours to cultivate new positive habits.

How long does it take for habits to grow to their full expression? There is no universal answer. Any advice you hear about a habit taking twenty-one or sixty days to fully form is not entirely accurate. There is no magic number of days.

In contrast, you can't achieve an aspiration or outcome at any given moment. You cannot suddenly get better sleep. You cannot lose twelve pounds at dinner tonight. You can only achieve aspirations and outcomes over time if you execute the right specific behaviors.

To generate lots of behavior options, you can use the following categories during your own Magic Wanding sessions. What behaviors would you do one time? What new habits would you create? What habit would you stop?

When talking about Tiny Habits, I use the term Anchor to describe something in your life that is already stable and solid. The concept is pretty simple. If there is a habit you want, find the right Anchor within your current routine to serve as your prompt, your reminder. I selected the term "anchor" because you are attaching your new habit to something solid and reliable.

As I accumulated dozens of new habits—mostly tiny ones—they combined to create a transformation. Sustaining all this did not feel hard. Pursuing change in this way felt natural and oddly fun.

Identity shifts are change boosters because they help us cultivate constellations of behavior—not just one or two habits here and there. This is important because most aspirations require more than one type of habit change. It's a set of new habits that will get you where you want to be—especially in the areas of fitness, sleep, and stress.

Question tradition. Who says you have to keep your vitamins in the kitchen or floss in the bathroom? Maybe your vitamins need to be next to your computer. Or maybe flossing works best when you keep floss next to your TV remote

Shifting identity helps you consider other new habits you might not have thought of doing that will move you closer to your aspiration.

The essence of Tiny Habits is this: Take a behavior you want, make it tiny, find where it fits naturally in your life, and nurture its growth.

You select one of your aspirations, then come up with a bunch of specific behaviors that can help you achieve your aspiration.

Despite all this, go big or go home is the way many people approach change. As a result, most people don't know how to think tiny.

The purpose of a Focus Map is to match yourself with easy behaviors that you want to do and that are effective in getting you to your aspiration.

In Behavior Design we match ourselves with new habits we can do even when we are at our most hurried, unmotivated, and beautifully imperfect. If you can imagine yourself doing the behavior on your hardest day of the week, it's probably a good match. It's probably a Golden Behavior.

Context Prompts can be helpful for one-time actions, like registering to vote. However, using Context Prompts for daily habits can be both stressful and ineffective.

Using Anchors is a great approach to designing prompts because anyone can do it. There's no need for fancy watches or whizzy apps to prompt new habits. You can do it yourself more effectively, and you will discover how transformative a simple design hack can be. The power of after is not magic, it's closer to chemistry. Combine the right behaviors with the right chronology, and, poof, a new habit is created.

I found that people typically have the most routines in the morning. This makes morning fertile soil for cultivating new habits.

Other lives are more unpredictable. No matter how haphazard your day might seem, I guarantee that you already have many routines that occur consistently enough to be used as an Anchor.

Location is the most important factor when you pair Anchors and new habits.