Breaking Bad Habits with James Clear

Do you have bad habits?  Are they costing you money?  We learn ways of breaking those bad habits and replace them with healthy ones with James Clear. James Clear’s first site, Passive Panda, is dedicated to helping people earn more money through freelancing, employment, and entrepreneurship. He started studying the psychology of why people clicked on certain links, read certain articles and bought certain things. The more he learned, the more interested he became in how habits shape our lives and his new project was born. How Habit Shapes Our Life We repeat about 40% of our behavior almost every day. Think about it. Do you brush your teeth every day, wipe down your countertops, take your vitamins? Yep, those are habits. Over time, certain habits can become part of our identity. I’m a runner and when I broke my foot (not running) several years ago, I had to give it up for weeks. It felt strange like I was not myself anymore. This applies to bad habits too. Do you always drink a soda with your lunch, have a cigarette with your first cup of coffee? You probably don’t even think about these things anymore, they’re just automatic, a habit. Creating A Habit There are three steps to creating a habit:  reminder, routine, and reward. Even bad habits have rewards, that’s why they become habits. James uses the example of your phone ringing. The sound is the reminder, the routine is to answer the sound, and the reward is finding out who is calling. If the reward is a positive one, even if the habit is negative, you will start to repeat the behavior, or routine, each time you receive the reminder. If this happens enough, you’ve developed a habit. Take The Emotion Out Of It Do you wait until you “feel like” doing something to do it? What if you never feel like doing it? Or by the time you feel like doing it, you haven’t left enough time to actually get it done. If you have things that need to get done, set a schedule and do them. Don’t wait until it’s easy to start. James sticks to a specific publishing schedule and