How the 'Seinfeld Strategy' Can Help You Stop Procrastinating

5 Triggers That Make New Habits Stick In his best-selling book, The Power of Habit (audiobook), author Charles Duhigg explains a simple three-step process that all habits follow. This cycle, known as The Habit Loop, says that each habit consists of… The Trigger: the event that starts the habit.The Routine: the behavior that you perform, the habit itself.The Reward: the benefit that is associated with the behavior. The image below shows how these three factors work together to build new habits. [1] Each phase of the loop is important for building new habits, but today I’d like to discuss the first factor: habit triggers. There are five primary ways that a new habit can be triggered. Trigger 1: Time Time is perhaps the most common way to trigger a new habit. There are also less commonly recognized ways that time triggers our behavior. If these patterns are bad habits, then you may want to take stock of how you feel at this time of day. How I use it: Time-based triggers can also be used to stick with routines over and over again.

Get Out of Your Head and Start Something Okay, quiet time… Time for work… Working shall commence now… One hour later… This is what happens at least thirty times a day. For many, our inner dialogue goes beyond just being disruptive. If you ever made your toys talk as a child or spoke to yourself aloud as you completed a task, that was you developing internal speech. Internal speech gives us psychological autonomy—our ability to self-regulate. The more difficult a task the more we utilize our internal speech to navigate it. Internal speech is dictated by two areas of the brain. The problem is not that we have internal speech but rather it’s the kind of internal speech our mind chooses to engage in. When our inner dialogue turns disruptive and unhelpful, this is called a cognitive distortion. Below are some common cognitive distortions with some tips on how best to spot and stop them from happening. All or Nothing This kind of thinking happens when we see something as black and white. Overgeneralization Discounting the Positive

Healthy Ways to Navigate Negative Thoughts I’ll never be able to do that. Nothing ever works. I can’t do anything. These are examples of the negative thoughts that can bombard us on a regular basis, according to Tamar Chansky, Ph.D, a clinical psychologist who helps children, teens and adults overcome anxiety. Negative thoughts are “automatic thoughts in response to uncertainty, anxiety, disappointment or other challenges.” We often interpret our negative thoughts as cold, hard facts. Yet they’re not. “[Negative thoughts] say more about [how] the brain is wired than about our particular situation.” That’s because our brain naturally tends toward negative thinking. Negative thoughts can sink our mood and perpetuate a sense of helplessness and hopelessness, she said. Consequently, the first step in navigating negative thoughts is to realize that they’re not accurate assessments of a situation. The second step is to pay attention to your thoughts. Name your source. Pinpoint the problem. Negative thinking magnifies problems.