I have read several books on the power of habits, including the book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear and “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg. Both books teach the power that habits have over your life and they both share compelling stories of how your life can change when you change how you respond to the triggers in your life. In other words, when you change your habits.

In this article, I am going to share my thoughts on how changing the routines in your life can drastically improve your life. These ideas are based on what I learned from James Clear and Charles Duhigg. I will also share how habits have impacted my life.

Negative Habits

Let’s look first at the impact of negative habits that are left unchecked in your life. When you have a bad habit, such as unhealthy eating or spending too much time on video games, these habits can compound over time to yield significant detrimental effects in your life.

For example, in the past I had the habit of eating out a lot and eating junk food whenever I felt stressed. I was not a master of these habits in my life. Instead, they were routines that I did on autopilot. Eating out and buying junk was something I did without much thought. The compounding effect of these bad habits was that I weighed over 330 pounds and I had no money saved up because it was all spent on food.

Another habit left unchecked in my life was time spent playing video games. More specifically, a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game. I spent entire evenings and weekends playing this game instead of engaging in healthier and more positive routines in my life.

Both negative habits compounded over time and left me sedentary and overweight. They also guaranteed I had no money saved up and that I was living paycheque to paycheque. It was also an unsatisfying life because I had nothing positive to show for my time spent outside of work.

Positive Habits

More recently, I have harnessed the power of positive habits in my life. I did this by adding new routines into my life that yielded beneficial outcomes instead of compounding negative effects. I have also been able to drop negative habits in favor of new positive habits. Changing my habits also led to weight loss and I am now down below 260 pounds.

In fact, changing your routines is one of the main ideas taught by Charles Duhig in his book “The Power of Habit”. What he teaches is that you need to replace the old negative routines in your life with new positive routines. He also teaches that you follow your routines in response to triggers in your life and by following those routines you get some rewards in your life, even for negative habits.

For example, my negative habit of eating out and eating junk food rewarded me with stress relief and tasty meals. These were positive rewards that I gained by engaging in these negative habits. Because I was getting positive results, these habits were hard to break.

However, I was able to replace eating out with having homemade meals. Instead of going to a fast-food restaurant I now cook bacon and eggs for breakfast. I still get a tasty and satisfying meal and I get the added bonus of saving the money I would have wasted on fast food.

Other ways I have leveraged the power of replacing the habits in my life is that I adopted the daily routine of writing in a journal every evening. At night this gives me something to do so I am not bored. It helps me capture my thoughts and reflect on my day. It is also something I now enjoy doing and has been something I do instead of playing video games all evening.

Another positive habit I have adopted is planning my week every Sunday and creating daily action plans and weekly objectives. This gives me a focus each day of the week and has me doing meaningful things with my time instead of falling into the habit of spending all my time on video games.

Conclusion

What is the message I want you to take away from this article? That message is that you have the freedom to choose your response to the triggers in your life. This is something that Stephen Covey (author of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) calls being proactive. He teaches that instead of reacting without thinking, you can be proactive and stop to think about how you will respond to a trigger in your life. By choosing your response, you have the power to change how you respond.

More powerfully, you can choose which habits or routines you have in your life. You can adopt new positive habits and you can replace negative habits with better habits. This is changing your routine, and this can change your life.

For me, I replaced a life of fast food, junk food, and video games with better and healthier routines. This had a significant positive impact on my life. What about you? What routines can you change in your life?