Do you ever wake up in the morning, do a little hand dance on your bedsheets in a bid to find your phone while your consciousness is still busy transitioning from alpha waves to beta waves? Me neither. Well, who are we kidding? We have all been there. Starting your day by checking emails and social media may seem benign at first, but it subtly weakens the foundation of the productive day you forecasted. This leads me to my question: how to do you form good habits or rather, how do you do away with bad habits?

Habits are things we perform routinely and they are usually personal. Habits are like the atoms of our individual persona and they ultimately indicate the type of person we are or want to be. First, to form good habits, we must have unwavering faith about taking on/doing away with that habit. Have you ever wonder why people use the word ‘religiously’ to qualify an act that is done with so much care and almost to perfection? This is because to religiously perform a task, you have to strongly believe that the purpose of the task is to connect you to your higher self or to metamorphize you into your best self. I will use an anecdote to illustrate this. I went to a session at a conference where students were sharing with the audience how reading transformed their lives. It all began with one book and when they discovered the respective purpose that reading serves them– for instance, changing their lives—they made it a habit to read at least two books a month. One student mentions that she listens to audio books during her daily commute and the other mentions that, as a nursing student, during her clinical rotation, she uses reading to bond with patients who are paralyzed or brain dead. These students believed that reading transformed their lives so they made it an integral part of their identity. It became a means of escape from the chaos of the world and a tool to impact someone else’s life. So, to form a good habit, you have to perform it religiously.

Just like in many world religions where the performance of its daily rituals is rewarded supernaturally, connecting to your higher self generates some rewards, one of which is making you a productive individual. One habit that I have incorporated into my lifestyle recently is making my bed right after I get up in the morning. It is like a morning ritual that sets the tone for how the rest of my entire day is going to play out. Making one’s bed may seem like a total waste of ATP which could be saved for a 10-20 seconds walk to the coffee machine. But, this mere act gives one a sense of responsibility and organization. From the touch of softness used to smoothen the surface of the sheets to the sense of sharpness used to tuck the sheets at the edges, making my bed is my panacea for a bad day before it even started. Early morning habits like this give you a mindset that yields positivity, happiness, and productivity. Some other habits that make people productive are engagement in any kind of physical activity, writing a gratitude journal, praying/meditating, cooking and so on.

Habits are not easy to form and simultaneously, are very hard to relinquish. The key to forming a good habit that becomes a part of one’s persona is believing in its transformative purpose, in its ability to make you better than you are today, in its ability to refine your individuality. This belief will go a long way in helping you to become whatever you want to be. I don’t like physics, but here goes an analogy. Think of your habits as magnets that form a magnetic field in the universe. It will only attract things that resonate with its natural frequency. Hence, to attract what you want, form habits that bring you closer to it.

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