By Daniel Robledo | Last Updated June 28, 2020

You wake up, you start going to your bathroom and the next thing you know is that you’re already in your office.

You just went from washing your teeth, having breakfast, getting your clothes on, and driving to work and you haven’t even realized.

That my friend, was a demonstration of the power of habits.

It would feel awesome if you can design your auto-pilot mode so that it make you as happy, productive, and healthy as possible right?

You wouldn’t be worried anymore of checking if you’ve done enough exercise, talked with your friends, or study for more than 5 minutes because you’ve already done all of it on auto-pilot.

I promise you that developing healthy habits and reframing bad ones is the single most powerful way of taking control of your life.

Today we are going to learn how to both build and break habits so that you can focus on what requires 100% of your attention and let the rest to your auto-pilot mode.

The Power Of Habits

You’ve probably already heard about Habits, and you’ve probably also thought: “Are they that important?”

Before we jump into some of the main reasons of why controlling your habits is the single most powerful way of controlling your life, let me show you a study made by the scientist Wendy Wood at the University Of California.

Wood wanted to study how many of our daily actions are based on habits, actions that we are not even aware that we’re doing them.

The results concluded that 45% of daily human actions are habits.

This means that almost half of the things you do in your life regularly are habits, it would be nice if you can make all of them to make your happiness increase, right?

The Habit

Luckily for us, habits themselves are not that complex, they are just a single chemical process in our brains.

As Charles Duhigg states in his book The Power Of Habit:

“A Habit consists of three steps; the first one is the cue, the signal that activates the habit; the second one is the behaviour, which can be mental, physical or emotional; and finally the reward, which helps the brain identify whether or not is it good to remember this process” – Charles Duhigg

There is a bit of neuroscience behind why habits appear in the first place.

According to scientific researches, habits appear because human brains, based on a survival need, are constantly looking for ways to consume less energy and habits are the perfect way to do that.

Our brains are energy consumers, they weight 2% of the body’s weight but consume 20% of the total energy supply, whenever a habit is being built, neuron-connexions are also being built.

These connections lead to very low energy consumption when performing the habit’s behavior.

To finish with, keep in mind that “neurological anxiety” is the main reason why a habit is formed.

Neurological anxiety is a term that defines the feeling the brain goes through whenever it is anticipating a reward that is coming, i.e, whenever you get trigger by a cue (which will eventually lead to a behavior and, therefore, a reward) your brain automatically starts a chemical process in which you feel forced to perform the behavior to get the reward.

You expect the reward and your brain wants it, that’s why you feel pulled toward the behavior.

The Importance Of Habits

Now that you know that almost 50% of your actions are habits, you probably understand the importance they hold.

Well, apart from controlling half of your daily actions, habits are a crucial part of human life because they are co-influent, in other words, one habit leads to another.

It is so much easier to develop more specific and complex habits when you’ve already built key habits related to that field.

For example, let’s say that you want to build the habit of running every single day.

Wouldn’t it be easier to stick to that habit if you already walk every day or if you already exercise 30 minutes a day?

You can apply this conclusion to pretty much everything you want to start doing, start with the key habits and then build up from there.

How To Build (and Break) Habits

Hopefully, you now understand how important it is to control your habits.

Let’s continue by learning how to both build good habits and break bad ones.

Develop Good Habits

Building good habits is a process that requires time and effort, keep in mind that every habit you try to build requires an initial commitment of willpower that you weren’t having to spend before.

This leads to a necessity of working on building the habit for a long time, and I know what you are thinking right now. Yes, the “21-day-rule” is a fallacy, habits take almost 66-days to stick in the long term.

The Conditional Dependency Method

You know that a habit consists of three steps: cue, behavior, and reward.

So, developing a good habit is a process that involves choosing those three stages.

The Behaviour

Let’s start with the behavior because it is usually the part that represents the habit itself:

• What do you want to do regularly?

If you are not sure what specific habit you want to build, here are some of my recommendations on crucial life habits:

• Exercising
• Talking Regularly With Your Close Friends
• Reading
• Meditating
• Building a Positive Mindset
• Developing a Focus Muscle
• Waking Up Early and Going To Bed on Time

The Cue

Now that you have the behavior, let’s choose a cue for your new habit and form a “Conditional Dependency”

A CD is a statement that refers to the correlation of a cue and a behavior:

“If X happens, then I do Y”

Conditional Dependencies are a great way of building habits because they give you a clear, specific, and non-flexible order to build the habit.

When choosing a cue, keep in mind what Duhigg states as “The 5 Categories of Habit Cues“

A habit is trigger by a cue that consists of one or more of these categories:

• Location
• Time
• Emotional State
• Other People
• Some Previous Action

Now, choose or create a cue for your new habit:

• If I need to go to somewhere near then I will go walking instead of taking the bus.
• If it is 11:00 am and I feel anxious to eat then I will go talk with a friend to distract myself.

The Reward

Alright, now that you have your new behavior, you need to reward yourself so that your brain wants to keep this new habit going.

Take care of rewarding yourself with something that contrasts your new healthy behavior.

• Play some videogames at night after exercising.
• Watch 5 minutes of Youtube for every study session you perform.
• Let yourself eat junk food one time per one full healthy-eating week.

A Long Term Road

Do not rush on building habits, making these changes to stick in your life is a slow and long process.

That doesn’t mean that you won’t see results early, in fact, you will immediately feel like something “clicked” in your daily life the moment you start changing your habits.

Break Bad Habits

Alright, let’s get into the hard part of this path.

Breaking — or reframing — bad habits is probably one of the hardest things that you can do in your life, that is exciting, isn’t it?

Luckily for us, reframing a bad habit is a simple 4-step process.

According to Charles Duhigg in The Power Of Habit, to break a bad habit you need to:

1. Identify the behavior
2. Experiment with the rewards
3. Isolate the cue
4. Design a plan

Identifying The Behaviour

The very first thing you need to do to break a bad habit is to know what you want to stop doing.

This step is easier since if you’re already planning on stopping doing something, you already know which routine you want to stop.

For the shake of understanding, I’m going to give you a personal example to follow along with these steps.

Let’s say that the behavior I want to stop doing is constantly checking my Instagram.

Experimenting with the rewards

To follow with, now that you know the behavior, it is time to answer two crucial questions:

• What is the cue, in general, that triggers that behavior?
• What is the reward you’re getting for doing that behavior?

After you have a general idea of what the cue is — we will dive deeper into this in just a little —, it is time to understand what is the enjoyment you’re getting for this bad habit.

This step may be simple in some cases but eventually, it can be so tricky since rewards are not always that obvious.

For example, I could think that the reward I was getting for constantly checking my Instagram was the novelty boost that social media gives us (which helped to trigger the behavior but was not the main reward).

When in reality I felt inside me that if I knew what my friends were doing with their lives by checking their stories on IG, I felt connected to them, I knew about them even when I wasn’t even talking to them.

In conclusion, the reward I was getting is the feeling of friendship, feeling connected to my friends.

Now that you know which is the reward you are getting from your old behavior, try experimenting with different rewards:

• Try different rewards for one week each.
• After you’ve done the old behavior and tried the new reward, write on a piece of paper the first 3 words that pop in your mind.
• Wait for 15 minutes and observe if you want the old reward.

If you don’t feel the neuro-anxiety we’ve talked about earlier to the old reward, then you have your new reward and hopefully, it is healthier than social media’s novelty boost.

For my example, I tried these rewards:

• Checking some interesting documental, video, podcast… to give myself a little bit of novelty.
  • This didn’t work very well for me.
• Talking to a friend whenever I felt like checking my Instagram.
  • This was when I discovered what the real reward was because I felt so good by talking with them that I was no longer tented to lose my time on social media.

Isolating The Cue

Alright, you are almost there, you have your behavior identified and you know both the old and the new reward.

Now it is time to isolate the cue, and let me tell you that this is easier than you may think because as I’ve told you before, every single habit cue belongs to one or more of these categories:

• Location
• Time
• Emotional State
• Other People
• Some Previous Action

To identify the real cue of your bad habit, write down everything related to one or more of these 5 categories of the previous moment of you performing the old behavior.

In my case, it went like this:

• Location: This didn’t matter for me.
• Time: Time didn’t matter so much either.
• Emotional State: I was so much more likely to check Instagram if I was in a bad or sad mood.
• Other People: It didn’t matter with whom I was to perform my bad behavior.
• Some Previous Action: If I was either taking a break or procrastinating, I was more likely to follow my bad habit.

Designing A Plan

Finally, you need to design an action plan — you can again base it on The Conditional Depency Method — to link your existing cue to your new behavior that will lead to your new reward.

This plan should look like a routine as much as possible and the more you do it, the easier it will get.

Don’t rush and permit yourself to fail, it is okay to not get a perfect 66-days streak on your new habit.

To finish with my example, I did the following things:

• First of all, I took care of my environment, I deleted my IG App from my phone and erased my account info from my password manager. Increasing my resistance to the old behavior.
• Then, I checked myself whenever I was either in a bad or sad mood after a non-work period to see if I wanted to check my IG.
• After that, if I felt like doing my old behavior, I performed my new plan according to the CDM. “If I want to check my Instagram, then I will take the time to talk with a friend later on”.
• Finally, I tracked all of my progress on my Habitica account to see how good I was doing.

I did all of this process 3-months ago and it worked perfectly, I stopped checking social media and got almost 8 free-time weekly hours back to my life.

How To Make Your Habits Stick

To finish with, I want to give some great tips to follow and mistakes to avoid if you want your habits to stick in the long term.

Don’t Depend On Willpower

Even if you are the most powerful person alive in terms of willpower, you will eventually either fail or burn out if you depend 100% on your willpower to both stick to good habits and preserve against bad ones.

You must make your resistance as low as possible to your new desired behaviors and as high as possible with your old behaviors.

• If you want to stop eating junk food, stop buying them, and get rid of the current one.
• Do you want to start exercising? Then sleep in your gym clothes.
• Wouldn’t if be nice to work more and with more focus? Turn off your internet while you’re working

Track Your Progress

You saw this one coming, right?

As I’ve said so many times before, tracking your progress and rewarding small wins is the way to go when you want new routines to stick in your brain.

• Select a habit tracking system, either physical or digital.
• Track your progress every time your cue appears.
• Do weekly or monthly reviews to see how you are doing and polish your system over time.

Avoid Common Mistakes

There as some mistakes that happen to all of us earlier or later that can destroy our hopes of changing our habits.

Not Starting Easy & Small

Don’t try to run a marathon if you can not run even 5 minutes. Start small and be patient.

Assuming Everything Will Go Great

Let’s be honest, life is mostly unexpected, prepare for something either good or bad to happen that will make you lose a little bit of track of your path.

Just be prepared and don’t be hard on yourself.

Not Setting A Punishment

This one may not work for everyone but setting a little punishment to yourself whenever you stick to your old behavior is a good way of preventing yourself from doing your old pattern.

• If you are interested in trying this technique, check out Beeminder, an App that charges you every time you fail on your new habit. A great idea would be to donate that money to some charity organization.

Not Having A Strong Reason

This mistake is both the most severe and most common of all of them.

Not having a strong reason of why you want to change your life is the way to go to failure, take the time to sit down and write down all of the reasons why you want to change, I’m sure you will find them in no time.

Take Control Of Your Life

I hope that you’re now full of motivation with all of this new knowledge and that you are already willing to start building those good habits into your life.

As always, change comes with action so I want you to start right now:

• Find a habit you want to either develop or reframe.
• Go through the identification of that habit’s loop.
• Develop a plan and try to stick with it for the next month.
• Track your progress and see how it went.

Keep in mind to be patient and be kind to yourself, the starting step is usually the hardest, keep it going!

Thank you so much for your time and let me know what you think both in the comments section and on Twitter, see you soon!

Media Credits

“The Habit’s Loop.” The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg, Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2014.

By Daniel Robledo| Last Updated June 21, 2020

It is 8:30 in the morning and your alarm goes off.

You start hearing that annoying beep-boop and you know you should get your ass out of bed.

You stand up like a zombie, get to your bathroom and you question whether or not to attend that class you have in 30 minutes.

You wonder if you could start your days with more energy, motivation, and fun.

Does this sound familiar to you?

If you are anything like me, you’ve struggled more than you’d like with morning slump and you want to learn how to make your days start with happiness & productivity.

Let me tell you that is possible and the solution is more simple than you may think, it is to develop a Morning Routine.

Today we are going to learn how to develop a start for your days that provide you with happiness, fun, health, and productivity.

Trust me, once you put the time on your morning routine, you won’t want to go back to your zombie-scrolling mornings.

Why To Have A Morning Routine

Before we jump into the process of developing a morning routine, let’s review why a morning routine is important in the first place.

The No-Decision Advantage

Routines, in general, are important for many different reasons but, one fact that stands out from the rest is the decisions-relief.

Whenever you build a routine, you are developing a habit of performing a series of actions that lead to a specific result without you even noticing you are doing those actions.

This leads to a less stressed brain, your willpower and decision making power is a limited resource, the less you spend on mundane tasks, the better.

A perfect example is when you walk from your home to school, college, work… You’ve done this same walk so many times that you don’t even notice you are walking.

Productive Momentum

Focusing now on the specific benefits of a morning routine, it’s important to notice that a morning routine should contain as many quick wins as possible to build “productive momentum” into your day.

What I mean is that you need to start your day with some victories, even if they are as small as waking up on time, doing 3 minutes of exercise, or drinking a full glass of water.

These quick wins cause your brain to enter on a “Success Spiral” — a state in which you chain one win with the next and you start getting so much more done than if you did not start with some momentum.

The Perfect Moment Of The Day

Another great benefit of developing a morning routine is that you can implement tons of little healthy acts that over time will build up healthy habits (exercising, meditation, stretching, expressing gratitude…)

Also notice that if you wake up early enough, you’ll be up when everybody else is still sleeping and you’ll enjoy a time of no-distractions in which your productivity levels will skyrocket.

Scientific Evidence

To end up with the morning routines’ benefits, Harvard professor and biologist Christoph Randler surveyed a sampling of undergrads to find out when they had the most energy and how likely it was that they would take on challenges.

The results? Students who were more energized in the morning were more proactive when it comes to addressing issues than those who got energy spurts later in the day.

We will talk later about loads of science-baked suggestions that you can add to your morning routine, but for now on, let’s learn the principles of building a great morning routine.

How To Develop A Morning Routine

Developing a morning routine is a 3-step process that contains a lot of experimenting.

Not everybody is a morning person and there is no scientific evidence that humans are more productive in the morning than at any other moment of the day.

So, if you are not the kind of person that enjoys waking up very early and work in the morning, don’t worry, you can also develop a night routine before you start your work in the last hours of the day.

Finding Your “Why”

First of all, you need to find a reason to get out of bed, a motivation that drives you to jump out of bed the moment your alarm goes off.

If you try to start building morning habits, which may turn out to be more difficult than you’ve expected, without a very strong reason to be doing them in the first place, your motivation will go out of fuel in no time.

There are two main strategies of finding your morning routine’s “Why”:

• Try to adapt your morning routine to your goals.
• Try to find something fun to do in the morning apart from the productive & healthy stuff.

Deciding The Time You Wake Up

Now that you know why you want to start developing a productive morning routine, you need to decide the time you wake up.

Here, it is important to understand that you don’t need to wake up at 05:00 am every day to be productive — although it could be a great idea if you’d ask me — because the routine itself is what makes you productive, not the time you wake up.

Planning The Time

I would suggest that you write down the main activity that you want to do in the morning, it could be attending your classes, going to work, working on your project…

Now, think approximately how much you’ll need to do every little habit of your new morning routine and add some extra time as a buffer.

• If you are bad at planning, you may want to check out my Ultimate Daily Planning Post

When To Go To Bed

Now that you have the time you need to wake up to accomplish everything you want, it is time to decide which time are you going to bed.

Because one of the worst things that you can do in your life is to sleep deprave, studies have shown that for every 1 hour you gain by not sleeping, you lose 3-4 hours of productive time.

I would suggest either sleeping 7 and a half or 9 hours — since sleep cycles occur every 90 minutes and you want to wake up at the end of one of them, not in the middle of one of them — and to sleep the same time every day, yes, including weekends.

If you want to easily calculate the time you need to wake up (or go to bed), I will suggest you check out the web Sleepyti.

Do Not Hit The Snooze Button

To finish this point, I have to tell you that your 1# goal when waking up is to not hit the snooze button.

When you hit the snooze button, you are accepting that the very first thing of your day is a defeat.

You’ve decided the night before to wake up at a specific time and you’ve failed, believe me, you do not want to start your days with a sense of defeat.

A great technique to help you get out of bed is to have an automatic wake-up response.

Something you do the moment your alarm goes off (hopefully jump out of bed), it can be anything as long as it wakes you up.

Building The Routine

Alright, now you know why you want to build a morning routine and you know when you are waking up, let’s start developing that routine.

To start with, let’s get the fundamentals right:

• Take care of your environment (Make your bed, spray something that smells good, play some good music if you want…)
• Do something that you enjoy.
• Do something productive or healthy.

As you surely know, the key to building any habit is to start small, focusing first on these 3 fundamentals of morning routines, you will get the inertia you need to build a full morning routine.

The Essential

Let’s continue adding more activities to your morning routine, I think there are 7 essential activities that any morning routine should have:

Nutrition

Your body needs energy to function, and that energy comes from the food you eat.

Eating a healthy breakfast will give you the energy you need to start your day greatly.

There are certain people (including myself) that do not enjoy that much cooking & eating in the morning, for these people “Intermittent Fasting” is the way to go.

Fasting is the process of not eating, “Intermittent Fasting” is a food schedule in which you restrict anything you eat to an 8-hour window.

There are tons of scientific evidence that back up the IF’s benefits.

I have been doing this process for more than a year now and it works perfectly for me so I do not have breakfast in the morning.

Hydration

Continuing with, water is an even more important aspect that food in human life.

Although you are somnambulist-water-drinker, you probably wake up in the morning dehydrated and you need to refill your water resources.

Having a full glass of water first thing when you wake up is both a healthy habit and a great way to wake up quickly.

Learning

Next, learning is a crucial factor in human life, and implementing it in your morning routine will give you a consistent path of developing new knowledge.

You can find a lot of learning resources to implement in your morning, including:

• Books
• AudioBooks
• PodCasts
• Articles

Exercise

Science has shown us that exercise is the one activity that boosts the most our productivity, health, and overall happiness.

Including just a 10 minutes exercise circuit in your morning routine will boost your energy levels so much that you’ll even want to include a full workout routine into your mornings.

Meditation

Meditation has always been an activity saw as something just for gurus or monks but in the last years, scientific researches have shown all of the benefits that this activity brings us.

The great fact about meditation is that it is so simple to perform that you have no excuse not to do it.

Just sit down for 5 minutes, close your eyes, keep straight and focus on your breathing.

Whenever a thought pops up in your mind and distract you from your breathing, observe the thought, accept it, let it go away and come back to your breathing.

Practice this habit every day in the morning and gradually increase the time you meditate, I guarantee you that the benefits will blow up your mind.

Journaling

As I’ve told you other times, externalizing your feelings is a really powerful way to control and enjoy them.

Having a journal in which you can express your feelings, thoughts, and anything that pops up in your mind is a great stress-relief strategy and you should include it in your morning routine.

I have been journaling every day for more than a year now and I’ve discovered that journaling is all about asking yourself the right questions.

I will suggest that you start with these:

• How am I feeling right now?
• Am I happy with the things I’m doing?
• Does anything have been bothering me lately? Why?

Light Exposure

The last essential activity that you should include in your morning routine is light exposure since it is a great way to wake up and D Vitamin is great for your skincare.

The perfect way to get light exposure is to go for a quick 15-minute walk in the morning, you may even put on some headphones and listen to some learning source.

Leveling Up Your Morning Routine

Hopefully, now you have a productive, fun, and healthy morning routine ready to go and you have already set an alarm for tomorrow morning to start practicing this new habit.

But, if you want to make your morning routine even more exciting and easy to follow, let’s see a couple of little things you can do to level up your morning routine.

Evening Routine

The very first thing that you should do once you have your morning routine is to try to reduce friction as much as possible when it comes to performing your morning routine.

This means, identifying any dependencies that your morning activities may have. They may be:

• Using headphones to listen to music, audiobooks, or podcasts.
• Changing clothes to workout in the morning.
• Needing space for meditation.
• Using some digital or physical media for your journal.

Now it is time to make those dependencies almost invisible, and the way to go here is to develop an Evening Routine.

You should take at least 15 minutes before going to bed to prepare everything you’ll need the next morning:

• Put your headphones charged at your front desk.
• Prepare your gym clothes and put them below your bed.
• Take out that yoga pellet to meditate.
• Bring a little notebook or download an App that you can use for journaling.

Developing an evening routine is as important as a morning routine since it provides you with almost the same benefits but with the addition of a good quality sleep.

Track Your Progress

The next thing I recommend you to do — as I do with every new habit that we build here — is to track your progress and reward yourself.

You’ve probably already known that tracking progress and gradually rewarding yourself is the most effective way to make a habit stick, and developing a morning routine is no exception.

So, starting tomorrow:

• Track your daily progress, you may want to use some app like Habitica.
• Reward yourself with some fun for every back and then that you get out of bed immediately.

Combine Activities

I know what you may be thinking right now: “This is great but, I do not have 2 hours every morning to do all of these things”.

You are completely right, not everybody has a flexible schedule in which to include a 30 minutes meditation and a full workout besides a walk to the park and a reading session.

But here we are people with a productive and problem-solving mindset, right?

The solution to this problem is what I like to call the “Tasks’ Intersection Process”, this means combining two or more tasks in one activity to reduce the time they consume in your morning.

I have been doing the “Tasks’ Intersection Process” with everything my morning routine includes and I have gone from a 2 hours morning routine to a 1 hour morning routine without taking out any activity.

Here are some suggestions on applying this technique:

• Read while eating breakfast (This is where audiobooks are so useful).
• Perform walking-meditation (Walk with only paying attention to your walk and your surroundings).
• Listen to something educational while you exercise.

Morning Routines Examples

To finish this post, I want to show you some examples of how a typical productive & healthy morning routine looks like.

Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Winfrey is a successful businesswoman and the hoster of The Oprah Winfrey Show – which I highly recommend –  that have told many times that one of the things that she hates the most is setting an alarm to wake up, even tho, she keeps a very productive morning routine that had helped her in her career.

• She wakes up at 6:20 am and take a tea.
• Then she workouts and afterward meditate.
• Finally, she eats breakfast and gets to work around 9:00 am.

Thomas Frank & Matt D’Avella

Thomas Fran and Matt D’Avella are two productivity & personal development-content creators. Both have similar morning routines and have said that it has been one of the most productivity boost sources in their daily lives.

• They wake up around 6:30 am and 7:00 am.
• The exercise first thing in the morning and go for a walk afterward while listening to audiobooks.
• Then they eat breakfast and get to work around 7:30 am and 8:00 am.

My Morning Routine

I have been experimenting so much with my morning routine a lot and I have found that this is the morning routine that works best for me.

• I wake up at 6:30 am.
• After basic hygiene, I prepare Coffee while listening to an audiobook.
• Then I read for about 30 minutes.
• Afterward, I meditate for 15 minutes and exercise for 10 minutes.
• Then, I work on my projects for 1 hour.
• After that, I spend 15 minutes walking and then I check my Email
• Finally, around 9:00 am I get to my college classes or to work again if I don’t have classes.

Develop Your Morning Routine

Now that you’ve seen some great examples of how a productive morning routine looks like, I hope you know everything you need to start developing your morning routine.

Remember that not everybody is a morning person and that you can delegate your work and healthy habits to later in the day.

In case you want to start developing your morning routine right now, keep in mind to start small, track your progress and little by little develop a fun, healthy, and productive morning routine.

Start Right Now

I want you to start right now developing your morning routine and to give it a try tomorrow:

• Decide right now one fun activity and one productive habit you want to develop.
• Try to wake up 30 minutes earlier this week and do those two things.
• Keep adding habits and build your morning routine.

I would be glad to hear from you in the comments below and you can hit me up on Twitter to tell me about the morning routines you are developing!

Thank you so much for your time, I really appreciate it and see you soon!

Media Credits:

Fernández, Marco. “Afternoon Sunshine” Marco Fernández Instagram, www.instagram.com/fdz.stories/.

Fernández, Marco. “Light Landscape” Marco Fernández Instagram, www.instagram.com/fdz.stories/.

Randler, Christoph. Christoph Randler, 2010, Defend Your Research: The Early Bird Really Does Get the Worm.