The Right Motivation: 23 Habits That Will Make Your Life Better
I came across a list of 23 habits that can seriously “level up” your life. There’s nothing supernatural about it; it all comes down to doing things regularly. And the picture below shows perfectly what happens when your motivation is right :-)
The caption on the picture reads: “The right motivation works wonders.”
I’ve split the habits into four groups: health, order and money, self-development, and thoughts and relationships with people.
Health and routine
- Do morning exercises.
- Train yourself to go to bed and wake up at the same time every day.
- Eat at the same times every day; your body will thank you for it.
- Get enough sleep: most adults need 7–9 hours. It really matters for how you feel.
- Give up fast food and other junk food, and start eating properly.
- Try to eat fruit, vegetables and berries every day. Replace the usual mashed potatoes and pasta with fresh vegetables.
- Drink enough water, for example a glass 10–15 minutes before a meal. A rough guide is about 2 liters of fluid a day for women and 2.5 liters for men, and that includes water from food and other drinks.
- Work on your body: burn fat and build muscle.
- Walk tall and watch your posture.
- Drop bad habits. Smoking and alcohol cause cancer and other diseases, so why doom yourself to an unhappy life?
Order and money
- Tidy up your room every other day and throw away the clutter.
- Write down all your “hanging” tasks, the things you should have done long ago that keep bugging you. Deal with them, and life gets easier. Tested on myself.
- Save money and start putting some aside for a trip. Traveling abroad broadens your horizons. It’s better to travel on your own, without travel agencies.
Self-development
- Start learning a foreign language and practice every day, even if only for half an hour.
- Read good, life-changing books.
- Spend no more than an hour a day on the internet (work aside).
- Cut back on computer games: they easily eat up hours you could spend on your goals.
- Find pictures of your goals and put them up where you can see them. Visualization really matters.
- Keep a success journal and write down your achievements every evening, any of them, even the smallest.
Thoughts and relationships
- Think about good things and smile more often.
- Give up swearing and filler words. In short, watch your language.
- Do one small good deed every day and don’t expect anything in return. Kindness comes back in other ways.
- Say nice things and give people compliments. It would be great if this became a habit.
How not to quit after a week
Nobody can adopt 23 habits at once. It’s better to start with one or two and add new ones once the old ones run on their own. In a study at University College London (Phillippa Lally and colleagues, 2009), people repeated one simple new action every day, such as drinking a glass of water with lunch or going for a run before dinner. On average, the action became automatic after about 66 days, but for different people it took anywhere from 18 to 254 days. And the good news: missing a single day hardly affected the result.
So:
- tie the new habit to something you already do every day: exercise after brushing your teeth, half an hour of language practice after lunch;
- mark every completed day on a calendar or in the same success journal;
- if you miss a day, just carry on the next day instead of giving up.
It’s all true, but following these rules isn’t easy! You have to push yourself and build the habit, so let’s start today :-)
P.S. It’s worth printing the list and keeping it on your desk so you see it all the time and remember it.