Habits

❝A good start is half the battle.❞
– Plato 🏛

In order to make habits ‘stick,’ we need to make them AUTOMATIC and EASY. Therefore, reducing the ⚡️ACTIVATION ENERGY⚡️ involved in a task much less energy to sustain it as a habit.

Have you ever procrastinated doing something for days or weeks only to eventually get around to doing it 😢, and realizing it wasn’t so bad after all? In fact, once you got started, perhaps it was pretty straight-forward, and not nearly as taxing as you’d anticipated. 🤔

THAT’S BECAUSE THE ACT OF STARTING 🎬 REQUIRED THE MOST EFFORT.

In chemistry, ⚡️ACTIVATION ENERGY⚡️ refers to the minimum effort required to create a chemical reaction🧪
“Psychologists have adopted this term to explain WHY STARTING IS OFTEN HALF THE BATTLE when it comes to human decision-making and behavior.

⚡️ACTIVATION ENERGY⚡️ is used to explain why some habits are easier to adopt than others, leading to applications in a broad range of fields including health and welfare, business psychology, and BEHAVIORAL CHANGE interventions 👩🏻‍🔬

➡︎ This concept has been particularly useful for understanding the MOTIVATIONS that DRIVE BEHAVIOR. If we understand that ‘STARTING’ is often the biggest barrier to action, WE CAN ACTIVELY TARGET THE STARTING PHASE OF AN ACTIVITY OR HABIT, with the understanding that it will likely make it easier to sustain.

At an individual level, we can do simple things to promote healthy habits, this are my experience reducing the ⚡️ACTIVATION ENERGY⚡️
Here you are examples from my daily life 😜:
· Keeping my fitness outfit 👟in the same spot by the bed, so I don’t have to spend time looking for them before going for a run in the morning 🏃🏻. Having my kindle reader at hand 📖, near the bedside table so I end everyday reading.
· Easy access to my guitar 🎸to practice after each work session. It is always out of the case and next to my job desk 🖥.
· Work on a draft post 📝 like this in a secondary application and copy-paste it on LinkedIn 🤓on Tues/Wed morning adding emojis, since it is very difficult to edit on this platform.

Anytime we do something that makes it EASIER for us to start a healthy habit, we REDUCE the ⚡️ACTIVATION ENERGY⚡️it requires, and therefore INCREASE THE LIKELIHOOD THAT WE WILL SUSTAIN THAT HABIT.