There is some serious habit formation going on in my house right now.
My son Hudson is about 4 weeks old. He seems to like his parents and is settling into a routine.
He is eating about 10 times a day and has been doing it for 28 days as I write this. That is 280 feedings in a pretty short period of time!!!! Each feeding is roughly 10 minutes long. This has got me thinking about habits.
It has been remarkable to watch both my wife and Hudson get the routine down. They have practiced nursing about 280 times. At 10 minutes per feeding, they have had nearly 50 hours of practice together. That is a lot of practice! Like any new routine they both struggled in the beginning to get the details dialed in. Now they are synced up and it all goes smoothly, kind of like a habit should.
This made me realize, if any of us put that type of consistent effort into anything, we could excel at it in no time, i.e. we could create a new habit. Think about learning a new language, knitting, writing an article, practicing public speaking, improving shoulder mobility or becoming bad ass at doing push ups.
10 minutes, 10 times a day would allow you to develop a new habit pretty quickly and become pretty darn proficient at almost anything.
Now feeding a baby may be an extreme example, because it has to get done. Hudson needs to eat. But that seems to be a key in creating new habits, deciding it MUST happen and committing to doing it consistently.
10 times a day for 10 minutes may be unrealistic for many of us and may not be necessary to build a habit. What is key however is to make the action small and manageable, and make it so easy that you can’t say no. Decide what you can realistically commit to and execute, 15 minutes a day, 4 x a week, 10 minutes 2x per day 5 days a week. What works for you? Feed that habit slowly and watch it grow.
Another piece of habit building strategy is having a trigger that serves as a reminder to start your action. For Hudson’s feeding there is no trigger like a little blood curdling screaming to make it known that it is time to eat. You may have a trigger such as; every time I finish brushing my teeth I will do 8 pushups.
The point here is that it is pretty amazing how quickly a habit can be built by doing something consistently and having a strategy to execute daily (or nearly daily) to whatever you are committing to.
