From exercising regularly, eating healthily, learning a new language, working on your novel, reading more, or simply pursuing your hobbies instead of scrolling through Reddit—these changes can feel so daunting that it seems like you have to transform into a completely different person. However, if you consistently take small steps each day with the right approach, your life can change dramatically.
Like many others, there is always a gap between who you are now and who you want to become.
There are small things you feel you should do and big achievements you want to reach. From regular exercise, healthy eating, learning a new language, writing your novel, reading more, or engaging in your hobbies instead of browsing Reddit.
But sometimes you feel that achieving your goals requires you to become a different person—someone determined, hardworking, disciplined, and strong-willed.
You may have tried very hard to become that person. And it worked! For a moment. Until you find yourself back on your old path. Ultimately, you always fail. With every failure, you become more fatigued and frustrated with yourself.
If you don’t succeed, it’s because you lack the desire, and every failure is your fault. Real change is incredibly difficult. And like everything else in life, it becomes easier when you understand why.
The Brain as a Forest
Imagine your brain as a lush and dense forest.
When you decide to do something, it’s like traversing through a real forest: it’s challenging and energy-consuming. Your brain hates expending energy, so it has devised a trick: every action and behavior leaves trails in your forest.
When you start doing something, you tread on branches to make your way through, gradually creating a path. The more you walk, the clearer the trail becomes. Over time, the trail gets easier to traverse, leading you to travel it more often and eventually turning it into a pathway.
As you repeat this action over the years, the path transforms into a road. Crossing it becomes easy, familiar, and comfortable. The clearer the road in your brain, the more familiar you are with its comfort.
Thus, we continue to use these paths, leading us to often do what we are used to. This is why change is hard, especially for adults, as your forest already has many roads and trails established.
To understand how these pathways are created, we need to differentiate between two concepts: Routine and Habit.
What You Do: Routine and Habit
A routine is a series of actions that you perform the same way every time because it works for you. For example, you use the right ingredients for your dish and cook them in a specific order because you enjoy the flavor.
Or, before going to bed, you set your alarm for 6:30 because that’s when you want to wake up.
Imagine a routine being established by an expert. It’s extensive and meticulously calculated, responsible for setting strategies and preparing mentally.
The planner understands the future and carefully decides the outcome you desire. Based on that, they select actions to achieve specific goals, no matter how uncomfortable, like taking a shower every morning.
Routines gradually turn into habits, making them easier to perform because they are essentially sequences of actions done without much thought.
You do it so often that your brain treats it as a reward and feels a sense of responsibility. Therefore, habits feel like you’re in autopilot mode.
You don’t have to convince yourself to do what’s a habit; you just do it.
The crucial aspect of habits is that they are triggered by conditions—things or situations that provide your brain with a signal to start a behavior or action.
You already have many conditions in your life, such as:
- Seeing your phone prompts you to unlock the screen.
- Buckling your seatbelt every time you get in a car.
- Buying coffee on your way to work often comes with a pastry, even if you’re not genuinely hungry.
Habits are executed by an impulsive child, responding to your immediate desires based on what’s around without considering long-term goals.
For the child, the future doesn’t exist, and it hates heavy lifting. So, when it sees an available condition, it leads you down an easy path in your brain toward familiar and satisfying results.
If you buy coffee, the child also wants a pastry because that’s what you do every morning. This feeling of satisfaction is also why your bad habits form: chocolate tastes good, and scrolling through Reddit is entertaining. This is why you repeat these actions, even if they aren’t good for you.
The feeling of satisfaction combined with repeated actions leads to the formation of bad habits.
It may sound like this child only wants to cause chaos, but in reality, it’s just as important as the planner, and both often work together. You need the planner to think deeply. But letting the planner do everything would waste too much energy. Shifting lighter, repetitive tasks to the child makes it easier for your brain to manage daily life while solving complex problems simultaneously.
So, if you want to change and create a new behavior in your life, you can use this energy-saving mechanism to make it easier. Focus on small things, not big ones. Improving your life gradually is better than aiming for a large goal and achieving nothing, especially since small changes will yield benefits over months and years.
How to Create Good Habits
If you want to change more easily, the best approach is not to force yourself but to persuade your brain that it’s not a big deal. By establishing new routines and transforming them into habits.
You want the planner to sketch out a path first and then use the child to help you act effortlessly.
For example, if you want to exercise to become slimmer, a pretty common goal, the first thing to do is break down this vague goal into clear actions. The aim is to make these actions as easy as possible: small enough to manage and clear enough that you don’t have to think much about them.
An example of an easily manageable action is “doing 10 squats” every morning. You can start by creating a routine that has a clear condition for the child to perform. Remember, the condition is simply a signal for you to connect with the action. It could be a specific visual cue, like your workout clothes, a particular time of day, or a specific place, like the park near your house—or ideally, all of the above.
The important thing is to always start your action in a specific context. This condition serves as a trigger to begin and will gradually become an automatic habit. So, to establish a home workout routine with 10 squats, make sure to do them while wearing workout clothes in the same spot and at the same time, like your living room at 8 AM.
Once you have the condition and the action, all you need to do is perform them regularly, ideally every day. If you keep this up, it will transition from routine to habit, from path to road.
Don’t get me wrong; doing squats still takes energy, but deciding to do it won’t feel forced—it’ll feel like a part of your daily life. It sounds simple, but it’s not easy. Many things you want to turn into habits often don’t come with immediate satisfaction, unlike the time spent scrolling through Reddit or Facebook.
To make your new action easier to repeat, and therefore easier for the child to perform later, make it more enjoyable. It’s not about rewarding yourself after each completion; it’s about making those actions more enjoyable. For instance, only listen to your favorite radio station while exercising. You need to find what works for you. That’s essentially it.
Surprisingly simple, these are things you can do to improve your life.
How Long Does It Take for Your Child to Independently Form a Habit?
How long it takes for your child to independently carry out a habit depends on each individual. It depends on the goals you set, the kind of person you are, your stress levels, and much more. It could take anywhere from 15 to 250 days for a new habit to become automatic when the conditions are met. You don’t know how long it will take.
Starting is easy, especially in the first week or two. Continuing every day is the challenging part. But the more you do it, the easier it becomes. There’s no surefire solution for change. Scientific studies on habits have shown it’s feasible, no matter your age.
Becoming a bit healthier or smarter is infinitely better than sitting idle and changing nothing. After all, change is a journey, not a destination.
This content is edited from the video “Change Your Life – One Tiny Step at a Time” on the Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell channel.