Start with a Keystone Habit

Example:

Changing your diet from junk food to healthy food.

What other areas of your life would be impacted aside from your waistline?

First of all, you would lose some weight, which may then inspire you to start exercising. After a little bit of time, you would notice that you have a lot more energy, and you feel less bloated or full all the time, which would help you become more productive at home and work.

And as you’re eating whole foods at home, you will start to see your weekly expenditures go down, so you may be able to start saving some money You will notice that your skin looks healthier, which might impel you to make a habit of taking better care of your skin

You will become generally happier, as your body is getting the nutrients that it needs to become balanced–both mentally and physically, which could lead you to make some social changes too. And so on…

What you will notice in this example is that the one habit of changing your diet can have a chain reaction impact on multiple areas of your life. Habits are contagious, and if you change a few critical ones–such as eating an apple instead of a piece of pizza–you can begin to do a larger overhaul of your life.

In this case, starting to eat healthy foods instead of junk foods would be considered to be a keystone habit.

Learning how to navigate our way through a habit process.

From Autopilot to Intention

The next few pages will explain and demonstrate the importance of understanding your current habits. Checking to see if your habits are happening on autopilot, and if so, changing the routine of the habit with intention.

Having an informed and educated intention to change an existing habit is a great start. Changing auto-habits into those that are good for our mental health, is not only an empowering action but a clear commitment of our intent to better manage our mental health.

There is no shortcut, trick or magical way to ensure we include healthy habits and changes into our daily lives. BUT! There is a process that, when repeated, can help us stick to the changes we want to make, and importantly, build on our embedded changes to eventually reach our long-term goals – whatever they may be.

Identifying the Pilot Habit

To help with learning and succeeding in creating a more effective habit, we must first recognise the significance of choosing a small step to begin with.

This should be viewed as your ‘pilot habit’. The ‘thing’ you want to change to improve your health, emotionally and/or mentally. Envisage yourself as your own R&D (research and development) department.

The more consideration, effort and planning you put into the pilot, the higher the chances are that when you come to analyse your findings, you’ll be in a more confident and stronger position to take a bold step towards making other changes in your life.

Activity: Let’s Choose A Habit

Now let’s look at the Advantages and Disadvantages of changing the ‘Routine from the chosen habit.

Write it out!

The best and most effective action you can take to help yourself plan and start to change a ‘routine’, is to write it out. This is the point in which we create a contract with ourselves – to do the thing we’ve planned to do.

If writing it out isn’t doing it for you, why not try an App? With today’s sophisticated technology, we can all download an App for pretty much everything in our lives. Why not delete some of the app’s you haven’t even opened for weeks and replace them with one that is really going to help?

Over 35 of the best Goal & Habit Tracking Apps, free and paid…

Best Habit Tracking Apps for 2024

Summary

1. A Keystone Habit – is a habit that has a domino effect in other areas, such as healthy eating can help us lose weight as well as feel good, reduce our fast food expenditure etc.
2. An Autopilot Habit – is something we do or have done repeatedly and no longer have to think about how or why we do it, such as brushing our teeth in a certain way.
3. A Pilot Habit – is a habit the we plan to study with a view to gaining a better understanding and either introducing a new healthier habit or changing an existing habit.