micro habits to change your life Archives - Affiliate Marketing Mentors

What are some micro habits to change your life? A micro habit is a tiny, easily achievable task which is ridiculously easy. Once micro habits are established, and perpetuated over years, they have the power to change your life. To make a dramatic change in your life seems daunting. Many people join a gym in January and set out a tough regime to workout and train regularly.

But by March they quit because they simply can’t sustain the effort they have set for themselves. A micro habit is a single push up a day, for example. Everyone can do a single push up. You can do a single pushup if you get no sleep or wake up with a hangover! That’s what your micro habits should be like – easy to do even on your worst days.

By setting an easily accomplished micro habit, you set the wheels in motion to sustain it more easily. Once in the push up position, it’s also much easier to do 2, or 4 or even 10 pushups, especially when the habit is well established. But initially, you should set it at a crazy easy level, so you maintain it.

Over several months of keeping this up, it will start to feel wrong not to do it. At this stage you know you have mastered the habit. You can start building on it if you like, but your main focus is simply keeping up your micro habit – 1 push up a day!

Micro Habits To Change Your Life

A micro habit won’t change your life overnight. But the idea of a micro habit is to generate a behaviour which will last. Compounded over several years, micro habits can be incredibly powerful. You already have habits which work for you, or against you. What time do you go to bed? When do you get up? These are likely to be habits you have created. Making it a habit to go to bed an hour earlier and get up an hour earlier can change you life.

Taking exercise every day can change your life. In our busy world, health takes a back seat and many find themselves not exercising at all. Medication takes the place of exercise when people become ill (often through lack of exercise!) Exercise has been shown to be more powerful than the best anti-depressant drugs, for example. So exercise is a good place to start if you want to choose micro habits to change your life.

Micro Habits To Change Your Life -Blogging

One of my micro habits is blogging. With a blog, you can set yourself just a single blog article per day, or week. Just write a single post a week and in a year you will have 52 posts. In 10 years you’ll have 520 posts!

I started blog posting several years ago now and it remains as one of my micro habits. At the moment I write about 5 a week. So in a year I’ll have written 260 blog posts – if I keep it at this rate. But when I started, I simply wrote something to get the wheels turning! My blogs now bring in a passive income from the internet through sales which come from my blog articles. See passive income and affiliate marketing.

Generating income from the internet doesn’t happen overnight. But if you make a mini habit out of learning affiliate marketing, over many months or years you can build an income from it which can set you free from a job.

Using Mini Habits To Remove Bad Habits

You already have some micro habits which you maybe don’t want. Eating too much or drinking alcohol perhaps. Or maybe you smoke and would like to quit? A micro habit you already have can be slowly removed using the Micro habits strategy. Instead of smoking 10 cigarettes a day, smoke 9! Make the first step towards your best outcome super easy to achieve and you will be more likely to take and sustain the action required.

Give yourself a difficult objective and you’re much more likely to fall short.

Habit Stacking

Once you have successfully created a micro habit you can stick to, you can add on other similar steps to your mini habit. So for example if your micro habit is one push up a day, after 30-90 days of doing your habit without fail, it will feel wrong to miss it! At this stage you can add something similar to your existing micro habit.

Add on a single sit up, for example. Over time as your micro habit becomes more engrained in your daytime ritual, you will naturally want to increase your repetitions too and add more to it. But keep your micro habit small and simple for those difficult days when you don’t feel like it. That way, you’re more likely to sustain it even in difficult times.

A small daily habit like a single push up won’t be life changing by itself. But the habit sustained over years can be built upon. It will stick with you if you maintain it and over a longer period of time this can be incredibly powerful.

Summary

A micro habit is simply a tiny, easily achievable task you can do right now, today. Rather than trying to change your life with a drastic and massive overhaul, change something small which you can build on over time.

Choose an area of your life which you would like some improvement on. It could be about a relationship, fitness, strength, income or anything. Then decide on a suitable step which you could do every single day. Make the step ridiculously small and almost insignificant. But the step should be easily achieved and you should be able to do it every day without fail – even on your worst days.

Over years, this will create a new habit which is unbreakable. This can be built on and results will come over time simply by maintaining your mini or micro habit.

Micro Habit Examples

Micro habits are the tiniest of accomplishments in the direction of your goals. To set a micro habit, decide on your longer term accomplishment and break it down into tiny steps which you can do right away. So for example if you wanted to lose weight, you could choose a micro habit which relates to diet or exercise. A single push up a day is an example of an exercise habit.

While a single push up won’t have massive implications for an exercise program by itself, it sets into motion a momentum which otherwise you wouldn’t have started. Once in the press up position, you’re all the more likely to do two, three or five pushups.

Choose a daily habit which you can do whatever mood or state you are in. A mini habit, or micro habit should be something you can sustain, even on your worst days. After all, it’s only one push up, so even if you’re completely depressed, you can easily manage it! It should be ridiculously easy and simple to do. Over time, your habit of doing something simple will grow, and you can build more activities on top if you’re having a good day!

Habit Stacking & Environment Cues

Habit stacking is adding new habits on to existing habits which are linked somehow. For example, after you have brushed your teeth at night, you might get into your bed clothes/pyjamas, or the other way around. You might have done this for years already without being very conscious of it.

With a push up, once you have developed a habit of doing your single push up a day, and this is well established, you can add something similar to it. So for example, you might add a sit up to your daily push up regime. Once you’ve completed your push up, just do a sit up. Again, start with an easy task and don’t give yourself too much to do initially. Once habits are well established and growing naturally, add something on to them.

Often well established habits which we already have are inspired by our environment. So in the office, you might naturally have the habit of checking your emails. A book by the bed will remind you to read before going to sleep. Once you’re in the car, you are reminded to turn on the radio, or play some music.

You can use these environmental cues to your advantage. So in the car you might start a new habit of listening to an audiobook, or self help book instead of the radio. Or you could learn a new language just by switching your old driving habits to some new ones and listening to foreign language lessons.

Micro Habits To Change Your Life

Micro habits can change your life if you have a long term goal you want some help with. Learning an instrument, speaking another language, getting in shape or building an online business can all be helped with micro habits. Often a long term goal of learning a new skill or escaping your job with an online business can feel like an enormous task. But with mini habits you only need to focus on creating the habit, which is much intimidating.

Once you have established your habit, the habit does the heavy lifting. Learning a musical instrument is only a matter of practicing a little each day. Mountains are climbed a step at a time and even a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. Mini or micro habits are those steps. If you focus on the step, the habits will take care of the long term goals.

Micro habits are therefore great for overcoming procrastination. As an affiliate marketer with an online business, having a large goal without a clear path to accomplish it can lead to procrastination. But with a micro habit, you only need to focus on the small, daily action you can accomplish each and every day. Don’t look at the whole mountain every day because it will put you off. Instead, focus on what little you can do which will get you further towards your goal.

By focusing on the tiny steps in front of you today, you avoid being off-put by the large mountain ahead. Celebrate small wins rather than looking at what you haven’t achieved. Focus on activity and not results and build tiny habits which lead to the result you want.