The Key to Creating Positive Habits

What personal habits would you like to change? Be they home, work or health related, I’ll bet you would see value in instilling some automatic practices that help you reach your goals.

Psychologists say the key to creating positive habits is to reduce your personal choices—the little excuses you make to allow yourself to wiggle out of exercise, for example, or ignore that gratitude journal you’ve been meaning to keep. The simple workaround is to set rules for yourself, taking your own capacity to make bad decisions out of your hands. You already do this all the time, probably without realizing it. Maybe your rule is that, if you’ve had two drinks, you don’t drive. Or that you don’t even look at your emails before 11 a.m. The results speak for themselves: In the former, you avoid making yourself a danger on the road. In the latter, you’re more productive in the mornings.