Linking Habits

One of the most effective ways, I’ve found, for establishing a new habit is to link it with a habit you’ve already developed.  Let me give you an example from my last week.

I love playing games.  I played a lot of games with my family when I was growing up, and my husband and I played a lot of games with other couples before we started having kids.  I like the challenge games can provide (my sisters and I are super competitive-in a friendly way-when it comes to cards), and I also like the opportunity it provides to hang out and deepen relationships.

Playing games was harder when we had babies because we would always get interrupted.  The baby would start crying, or the little kids would need us to do something for them, etc.  We kind of got out of the habit.

Now that our kids are older, I’ve been trying to get us all to play more games together.  We tried a few different tactics to make that happen, but the most effective one was linking games with our family night.  We have developed a really good habit of having a family night every Sunday.  Someone gives a lesson, we sing a song, share a thought or scripture, give a shout out to someone in the family for doing something great, go over our schedule for the week, and talk about any issues or goals we have as a family.  We’ve been doing it for such a long time that we don’t even have to think about it.  We just know we are going to do that when we get home from church on Sunday.

I recently made a new chart to help us keep track of which person in the family was responsible for each task in our family night (we rotate who does what).  The other chart I had been using didn’t include our youngest girls.  As I was thinking about what I could add so we would have 8 assignments to match the 8 people in our family, I decided to put “game” as one of the jobs.  That was the most genius thing I could have done.

Now, each week on Sunday, one of my kids is going to make sure that they get to have their turn of picking the game we play.  They make sure we do it.  Not me.  I had to think about it once (to put it on the chart), and now it easily happens because it is linked to our already established habit of family night.  If I was trying to do the game on some random day at a random time, that would be much harder to create the habit.  But since it is linked to the habit of family night (which is so much a habit that we just do it without thinking about it), it makes it so we hardly have to think about doing it.  We have played way more games since we included the game assignment on our chart, and everyone loves getting to choose the game they like.

There are so many ways that you can link a new habit you want to do regularly with a habit you already do regularly.  Do you brush your teeth every night and want to start stretching?  Put a reminder to stretch by your toothpaste.  Do you eat breakfast every morning and want to start reading more? Put your book by your breakfast dishes.  There are so many possibilities.  Find something that you already do consistently, and figure out a way to link your new habit to that.