The last few weeks have been extremely stressful for Laura at work. So to lighten things up a bit, Laura has gotten into the habit of retail therapy or shopping to relax. After shopping, Laura feels a quick rush of happiness. The only problem is that this happy feeling disappears when she goes back to work.
One day she was paying her bills and discovered that her spending habits had caught up with her and now she was strapped for cash. Very quickly, she discovered that more spending equaled more stress and anxiety, and not happiness.
So she borrowed money from friends and family to get through the month, but she didn’t change her spending habits. This continued for a few months until her family and friends finally shut their wallets and told Laura to “stop overspending.”
Laura tried to make some small changes, but her willpower ran out and she caved into her old habits. At this point, she was discouraged, broke, and losing hope for change.
How Laura Changed Her Habits
She reached out to a family friend for help who happened to be a financial wizard and was willing to offer free advice. Here’s what they did:
- Created a plan for Laura to pay off the debt in small manageable chunks, which included picking up some extra hours at a part-time job to get some more cash flow.
- Brainstormed ideas for creating healthy spending habits such as: keeping a weekly budget and money journal.
- Discussed why Laura felt that she needed to spend money to be happy, helping her to discover that she usually spent more money when she was stressed out. So she needed to find a way to manage her stress better.
It took Laura a few weeks to get the hang of this new way of life. Eventually, she discovered that money alone couldn’t bring her happiness. However, she also learned that money is a very helpful tool that should be used with balance. She just needed to take her emotions out of her spending.
The end.
8 Things You Should Know About Creating Happy Habits
Whether you are looking to create change in your spending, eating, exercising, or anything else, it is important for you to understand how habits work, so that you can be more effective in changing them. Here are a few tips to follow when changing habits:
1. Change or don’t change. Make a choice, meaning don’t be wishy-washy about your decision. Decide if you want to change and then do it.
2. Find somebody who has already made the change that you want to make and ask them for advice. Then model or copy what they did so you can get similar results.
3. Create a plan to make a change with clear actions that you can follow daily. Avoid creating tasks that you are not motivated to accomplish. Be realistic about what you are willing to actually do. Keep it simple only creating a few options that you can quickly decide on.
For instance, in Laura’s case when she gets stressed out and wants to spend money, she can have the choice to go spend time with family or go exercise.
4. Change the way you think about your current situation. If you think that spending money or eating more will make you happy, then ask yourself why you think this way. Maybe there is another way to be happy.
5. Don’t rely on your willpower to help you get through this change. Your willpower will eventually run out of fuel. This is why it is important to have a plan to keep you from giving into temptation. In Shawn Achor book The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work, he quotes:
“…Roy Baumeister’s willpower studies showed that self-control is a limited resource that gets weakened with overuse.”
6. Make your new habits easier to do. Make your old unwanted habits harder to do. Again Shawn Achor has a great a great quote about this:
“…Lower the activation energy for habits you want to adopt, and raise it for habits you want to avoid. The more we can lower or even eliminate the activation energy for our desired actions, the more we enhance our ability to jump-start positive change.”
7. Be patient with the process, it takes a lot of time to change a habit, sometimes more than the 21 days.
8. Don’t do this alone, it is so important to have a social network of people with your best interest in mind. These people will help you remember why you started this change in the first place.
Final thoughts
Changing personal habits take effort and patience. Be kind to yourself and start with small, consistent steps.
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