15 Methods for Conscious Habit Formation

Habit formation requires practice and repetition.

Divergent experience is essential to habit forming. A new feeling must be introduced. This can happen either by accident or intentionally. The physical touch of therapeutic bodywork (such as Zero Balancing, Rolfing or Cranio Sacral Therapy) and the novel movement explorations of Somatic Movement Education (e.g., BodyMind Centering, Ideokinesis, Alexander Technique) can incite divergent embodied experience and promote the formation of new habits.

Once you experience something new and unfamiliar, both your central nervous system and your sensory-motor system get a zing! The new flavor experience lights up a pathway of potential change, if only for a fleeting moment. This is where repetitive exposure and learning kick in. If you dedicate yourself to rediscovering the zing of that feeling and to learning what conditions you can create to sustain it for longer and longer, the feeling will eventually become a habit that you can access with increasingly less effort. This is a self-empowerment process; a means of participating in your own health and wellbeing.

Since I’m often working with people to help them feel new potential in their bodies and to shape new bodymind habits, I’ve come up with the following list of Habit Forming Hacks, 15 in all. If you want to replace a so-called ‘bad habit’ with a new, more conscious behavior, I recommend giving them a try. You can skip around the list until you find an approach or combination of approaches that works for you!

1. Create a detailed, feel good narrative. Think about the new habit you want to form more than the bad habit you hope to shake. In other words, shift your focus toward an imagined positive outcome. If your new habit goal is to wake up earlier each day, make it your business to daydream about how fabulous it will be when you’re up with the sun. Gush in your journal about enjoying the extra morning time languorously sipping coffee from your favorite mug. Talk to people about about your goal. Get specific about any changes you might have to make for your target to be within reach (e.g., no technology one hour before bed). Create a narrative that uses language to describe your ‘progress towards’ rather than distance from your desired goal. I’m on my way. I’m getting closer. The days I wake up before 8am feel so good. Get the picture?
2. Interrupt yourself. It may sound odd, but getting in the habit of interrupting yourself can be a stepping stone on the road to change. This requires first recognizing the conditioned habit or behavior you want to change. Let’ s say, for example, that you want to get better at accepting compliments. In this case, the next time you notice yourself dismissing a kind word with an eye roll or a rebuttal, STOP! Dead in your tracks. Create a physical glitch in your system by cutting yourself off before completely abolishing the endorsement. Do this enough and you’ll be surprised at how often you were unconsciously repeating a behavior that absolutely wasn’t serving you. Once it’s clear, begin to insert your new, more desirable habit in place of the old one. In this example, that might involve pausing to blush, saying thank you and becoming increasingly more comfortable with recognizing your own truth as it has been generously highlighted by a caring observer.
3. Visualize yourself practicing your new habit perfectly and in technicolor. Do this as a ritual — carve out uninterrupted imagination time. Get comfortable. Put your phone away. Flesh out every detail even the context in which you achieve desired habit perfection. Breath in how it feels as you picture yourself practicing your new habit. Notice what shifts you experience in your physical body as you take the image in through your imaginal/visual field. Sports psychologists confirm that Olympians improve their performance through multi-sensory visualization. There’s no reason why laypersons too should not harness the power of such enriched visualization towards achieving our goals no matter how large or small.
4. Try something new. Sometimes we’re just stuck in a rut and we can’t see our way out of the dark. Albert Einstein cogently noted that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” Poor habits keep us in endless cycles of repetition. To avoid the trap of our own unconscious behavior, brainstorm a list of different ways you might approach your desired habit outcome. Get creative. Make an exhaustive inventory. Pretend you’re different people coming up with these ideas for you! And when you think you’re done, have an idea party. Gather some trusted friends and see what fresh approaches they add to your list. Then, try the things. Be a scientist of self. See what learning can be gathered from the experiential process and what new habits might rise to the surface as a result.
5. Connect with the ground. Lightning needs a conduit to reach the earth. That’s why it strikes tall, vertical structures like skyscrapers, telephone poles and trees. If you’re aiming to conduct the spark of a new habit, you’ve got to give it something to connect with. How? While you’re practicing, make sure you’re grounded. If you’re seated, feel your sitz bones against the hard surface of your chair. If you’re standing, feel the soles of your feet against the ground. Going barefoot can be a boon whenever possible. Send your breath to your low belly and take a moment to feel yourself in your environment. Look around and become aware of the space around you. Understand your relationship to the space, feel your relationship to yourself. From here, you may begin practicing a new habit.
6. Work backwards. Is your habit forming goal actually within reason for you to achieve? Or, in your current circumstances, with the resources available to you, is it unreasonable for you to expect yourself to make this change? If you’ve found progress towards your goal near impossible, give yourself a reality check! Do you actually have all the resources, skills and time needed to create this habit? Or, is there a gap, or a few gaps that need to be filled before you can expect yourself to hone in on your target? It’s important to be realistic and honest with yourself. I used to teach creative movement classes to public elementary school students. I’d often go into class with the structure of a lesson plan, only to realize in the classroom that the children had knowledge and experience gaps that I had to first fill in order to facilitate my intended lesson. In other words, the lesson plan for the day often turned out to be the lesson plan for the month with many incremental lessons and steps along the way. I had to ask myself, is it within my students’ capacity to respond to the information I’m offering? You might be in the same position. Take stock. Do you have the mental, emotional and physical energy required to practice your new desired habit? Do you need to learn a new skill in order to make it happen? Do you have to make any shifts to how you prioritize your time in order to make space for it? Work backwards asking questions this way and then, begin making incremental changes on the path towards your goal.
7. Celebrate your successes along the way! Become a member of your very own cheerleading team! Train yourself like Pavlov did his dogs, with positive reinforcement. Find ways to give yourself bursts of serotonin to incentivize your commitment to intentional habit forming. If you like the process, and it is fun, it cannot hurt.
8. Accept failure as an integral aspect of learning. Forming a new habit is basically an innovation for your personal eco-system. But systemic overhauls don’t often happen in one fell swoop. Non-confirming experiences, moments where you learn something that doesn’t confirm what you already know, can be eye-opening and at the same time, disappointing. Making an effort without the payoff of immediate success can have the signature flavor of failure. But through trying and trying again, with each imperfect attempt, there is a curve where learning can happen. What would it be like if you met your failures with a sense of enthusiasm for the lessons you’re about to learn, ones that could catalyze your habit forming into high gear? When you fail, and you will, we all do, ask yourself, what went wrong? What could I have done differently? When you see clearly what didn’t work, it often brings to light a new way forward. If you develop the skill of reflecting on your failures without getting down on yourself, you will be taking a step out of your own way and closer to your desired progress.
9. Mantra. With no formal definition a mantra can be described as a formula of words, a sacred utterance, a numinous sound, a holy thought, a prayer. The concept and practice of Mantra is originally detailed in Vedic Sanskrit texts from ancient India and is used in Hinduism, Taoism, Sufism and various forms of Buddhism among other Eastern religions and meditation practices. Reciting a mantra is like seeding the cosmic field with the signature vibration of your intention or desire, in this case…to form a new habit. I make my bed each morning. I feel gratitude for being alive. It’s like the previous mention of visualization but using the power of words, rather than imagery, to evoke visceral meaning. Mantra practice harnesses the power of the quantum, holographic universe by proposing intent through repetition with devotion. A mantra can be a single word, or a phrase, it can be thought, spoken or chanted and it can even be turned into song. You can post it around your house so it stays alive in your consciousness or you can visit it each morning upon waking. Some believe you can amplify the power of your mantra with certain Mudras (hand positions) or Asana (Yogic postures). The idea is to entrain your consciousness by focusing on your intention while repeating your mantra. Letting go of thinking about it and instead, become one with the vibrational idea of it. Imagine what habits we could collectively form if more people recited this popular mantra: Om mani padme hum.
10. Learn from educators you respect and admire who create safe, empowered learning spaces. Sometimes the best way to learn a new habit is to put yourself in a learning environment. Learn from teachers who don’t profess to be experts but who instead are committed to lifelong learning, dialogue and the capacity for change. As we get older and more experienced, many traits and habits crystallize into specific forms, behaviors and ideas, but the more rigid we become the less responsive we are able to be. So learn wisely.
11. Seek support and accountability. Normalize admitting that you’re not all the way there and you’re not ashamed. It won’t be a surprise to anyone that you’re actually not perfect! Ask a trusted friend to check in on your progress, respectfully. Give them permission to be honest as long as they give you the freedom to decline from sharing when you’re needing privacy or boundaries. Accountability partners can seriously make a world of a difference. They can remind you to try some of the other tactics from this post, like have you celebrated a minor success recently? Boom. Boost of serotonin, back on track.
12. Make room for letting go. Are there stubborn parts of you clinging on that get in the way of the person you’re trying to be or of the new habits you’re trying to form? Do you feel as if you’re swimming upstream against the flow of all your deeply grooved tendencies, the ones that are antithetical to the changes you’re trying to make? Have you done ‘the work’ to unpack this aspect of your conditioned self and yet, you just can’t seem to make the shifts you desire? Rather than continuing to fight yourself, which amplifies the energy around what’s negative, why not find a way to just let go? Conduct a funeral ritual, if you will, for the part of you that isn’t serving the present you. Thank it for it’s contributions, after all, no one chooses to develop harmful or dysfunctional patterns if they didn’t serve to benefit your survival. Make the process ceremonial and sacred whatever that means to you. Perhaps write down what’s been stopping you then tear it up or let it smolder if you have the capacity to safely burn and put out a fire. Or you might create a guided meditation where you see your undesired reactions leaving your body and nestling somewhere outside of you where they can get comfortable (the earth, the ocean) and lay to rest. Sometimes I think of Zero Balancing sessions as this kind of a ritual. A client did once say that ZB feels like preparation for the ultimate Shavasana (corpse pose). Through intentional framing and physical touch we shift the felt-sense focus towards how we want to feel/be and we stop fighting our well worn battles. Maybe one day this kind of letting go ritual can become a community event — a collective grief ceremony, to move us closer to who and how we want to be. It is something I’ve considered as a possibility for how we can contribute to building a culture of Anti-Racism in the US — more on this soon.
13. Tune your dial to listening more often. Reinforced by a culture of consumerism and productivity, we’re often operating in control mode; performing, doing, making things happen, organizing, achieving and so on. But there are other stations available for us to tune into. What would it be like to intentionally shift over to different frequencies of consciousness with greater regularity? I hear there are great programs on the listening channel, the observation channel, the soft-attention channel and especially on the space-between-feeling-and-reacting channel. What would it be like to be more curious about yourself existing and operating in these different states? What might change about your behavior without you even trying just by modulating the quality of the attention you bring?
14. Harness your natural flow to your advantage. Have you been trying all the previous habit-forming hacks to no avail? Perhaps you’re suffering from a deficit of your own vital energy. Are you attempting your new desired habit from a state of depletion or at a time of day when your energy tends to droop? Have you ever tracked your energy ebbs and flows over time? I find, for example, that while I tend to attempt the task of writing during daylight hours, I often find it excrutiating to sit at the computer typing while the sun’s up. Yet as soon as the stars are out, the words tumble from my fingertips to the screen (it is 1:13am as I write this). When I try to write during the day, is it possible I’m battling an unecessary ‘should’ demon, when writing in the late evening might lend a great deal more ease to my projects? Maybe midnight is my magic hour in which case, wouldn’t it be sad for me to miss out on connecting with the full potential of my creative flow? What are the ways in which you can more intentionally harness your natural rhythm? Do your nutritional factors weigh in? Your environment? Your physical output? Your relationships? Your media intake? The season? Observe yourself and see if there are any adjustments you might make for habit-forming impact.
15. Finally, practice new habits in a space of nonjudgment, self compassion and high personal esteem. I need not wax poetic about this one. You are much more likely to succeed at anything if you’re not fighting an uphill battle against yourself as you try. Make sure you’re on your own team.

Ultimately, through a somatic lens, habit formation ought to be about building response-ability. Our ability to make choices when responding, to not be limited by overly rigid, fixed habits — to have a full range of autonomy. I personally play with all of these tactics myself and in session with my clients. Looking forward to hear which work for you.

Honest share: habits I’m cultivating at the time of publication include daily flossing, scapular glide, cooking with less oil, cleaning dust and clutter the first time I notice that I’m bothered by it, not always biting the bait in heated political debates and feeling hope.