How To Make a New Habit in One Week

Work Smart and You Can Pull It Off

Michał Stawicki
Published in
4 min readJul 31, 2017

--

Sometimes it takes as little as three seconds. In that case it’s a matter of determined decision.

However, it’s quite hard to engineer. I’m no Tony Robbins to convince you that you can change your life with a mere snap of your fingers. Of course, you can; you can also win the lottery. But the probability really stinks.

I know a way to make a habit within 7 days

It’s simple. The key to it is repetition.

Habits are automatic or semi-automatic behaviors that are triggered by a cue. So, if you want to create a habit, come up with a good cue and intensely focus on repeating the behavior every time.

Unfortunately, many habits are not suitable for this method. If you want to meditate every morning, you obviously cannot repeat the wake up-meditation cycle many times in one week.

But only part of these habits are excluded from this technique. You can develop plenty of different habits using this method, and you can do it fast.

7 days is lightning-fast

By the way, do you know how rapid 7 days is in habit creation? The medium for developing a new habit is 66 days, and I say this applies only in case of favorable circumstances. It also means that 50% of people take more than 66 days to develop a habit. Seven days is like lightning.

A Trick for ‘Big’ Habits

To develop a habit in a week, you need to compress a lot of repetitions into your days. This excludes also many ‘big’ habits, like reading a book for 30 minutes or writing 500 words a day.

But there is a trick that overcomes this obstacle. Habits are all about triggers (I simplify, but at least in 80%). So you can train yourself in a new habit in tiny doses.

For example, every time you come into your bedroom, take a book from a bedside cabinet and read one paragraph. You can repeat such a behavior many times in a span of one week.

--

--

Authorpreneur. Progress fanatic. I help people change their lives… even if they don’t believe they can. I blog on http://ExpandBeyondYourself.com/