How To Make a Habit in Four Minutes
So, let’s first value habits.
Think about how you lived your life yesterday. From when you woke up, did your morning routine, got ready for work, spent your whole day, and how it ended.
Now think of the day before. How similar are they? Now think of today. How many common actions are there?
How many things did you even have to pay attention to? Did you pay attention to brushing your teeth? Was that a hard decision to make? If you drove to work, was it hard to make decisions on the road or did you listen to the radio or a podcast and zone out?
Our lives are made up of patterns that we become accustomed to, and they become instinctive to the point that we don’t need to over think it. There’s less decision fatigue, and we become more efficient in our process of executing these daily tasks.
This is a great story to appreciate – we are our habits.
What is a habit?
Fundamentally you can look at it as a routine, or a neurological path or pattern, that your mind becomes accustomed to. It’s really your nerves firing together more routinely and that becomes the instinctive and easier action to take because it’s familiar to the mind.
“Neurons that fire together wire together.” – Donald Hebb
This is a very famous quote in the neuroscience world, and if you want to really go on an amazing journey of how incredible the mind is, find the book The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge.
In this book, they even talk about animal experiments that showed through training, the mind created new neurons when others were severed.
The point I wanted to make there is that even at a scenario that you lose neurological connections, the mind can recreate new ones with practice and training. That book will absolutely blow your mind.
I wanted you to value that ANY HABIT you truly want to create is possible with time and practice.
Diet? Exercise? New language?
Full disclosure, most of the information I present today is from two other books:
Atomic Habits by James Clear
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
I want to summarize them simply so you can implement this, but I highly recommend one of the habits you make is reading OR listening to books, and those should be at the top of your list.
Both describe this systematically (with slightly different takes), but it really boils down to a Pavlov’s dog approach.
If you’re not familiar with this, the Russian researcher Ivan Pavlov created an experiment with a dog. He would ring a bell and feed a dog. He kept doing this for many days. Then one day he rang the bell and didn’t feed the dog but the dog would salivate thinking he was about to be fed.
The value for you is that you have cues in your life that lead you do to Good or Bad things. Thus, you have Good or Bad habits.
Think of the Habit Loop (1 to 4 and loops back to 1)
Cue
Craving
Routine
Reward
Now in order to implement a new habit or break an old one, it’s important to think about this cycle.
I’ll use one of my good habits I’ve established – making my bed. I never did this routinely.
The Cue was as simple as waking up. My craving was really to move on with my day and get coffee, so my old routine was walk away and not worry about it. The reward was time.
Then something changed when I notice my girlfriend was routinely making my bed. I enjoyed my room more because it was more calming, neat, and tidy.
So I wanted to implement this. However, this is where you’ll meet resistance because it’s not your normal routine.
Every time I went to do it, I had to use some motivational discussion of “this is my first act of discipline today” and kept on this every day.
Now I crave seeing my bed made.
The same idea applied with doing dishes in my apartment. I don’t have a dishwasher, and I made a decision that, “I don’t go to bed with dirty dishes”. ´
I won’t say I’m 100% successful on either routine, but close to a 95% success rate to date.
Those are simple ones keeping your life in order… What about real skills?
Well, learning the guitar was something I put off for years. I even bought a guitar and didn’t pick it up once for two years.
Then I got a teacher, and it kind of helped. A bit.
It was good for accountability and helping me learn the proper technique.
But then after I read atomic habits, I learnt research that James Clear spoke of, and it was fascinating to know frequency is greater than duration for developing these connections.
Instead of trying to practice 30 minutes once a week (which I hated because I sucked), why not four minutes a day every day?
And that’s what I did.
It’s important to note, I could go longer but always needed my minimum of four minutes.
I cannot describe how effective this was. I actually felt the chords and music become easier and easier each day. After two weeks, I was playing for 30 minutes for ENJOYMENT!
I did the same thing with reading before bed, which also helps me fall asleep earlier than ending my night watching TV).
The four-minute concept has drastically changed how I look at trying to implement habits and new behaviours.
It’s ironic that you’re probably thinking, “Well that can’t be enough to make a difference in my fitness/diet.”
Remember that I said two important things:
Neurons that wire together fire together
Frequency over duration
If you make a cognitive act to improve something DAILY, that four minutes is changing your neural pathway.
Even if you started with a four minute workout every day, the odds are you will build the habit better than one 40 minute workout each week.
As annoying and cliche as it sounds, it’s practice.
It won’t blow your mind to learn that you get physically stronger through strength training – but it may surprise you to learn that you don’t actually get stronger in the first two months of consistent strength training. You just use your brain to move better.
That’s right – the first two months of strength training is all motoneuron development, which is fancy talk for brain to muscle.
Consider a habit you really want… And you really need to want this because behaviour change will be hard in the first month. Try making a promise to yourself you will do it for four minutes every day for an entire month, with maybe one or two days off as grace per week.
Make sure you chose ONE habit and don’t overwhelm yourself. Each month you can add something new if you feel the new routine has set in.
I am honestly implementing this again in my life with reading as I lost track of it and regained the bad habit of watching TV late over the holidays.
Now I have a hard stop, and I must read for at least four minutes before bed.
I’m getting great reading time in and I’m getting better sleep.
Choose ONE habit and own it.