[Podcast] Habit Stacking: The Key to Habit Formation (Plus My Favorite Habits)

Will Chou's Personal Development Show Podcast - A podcast by Will Chou: Blogger and Podcaster

One of the worst things you can do towards your own success is let your behaviors and environment control you so you slowly drift into worse habits.
It’s dangerous because it happens so slowly over time that you don’t realize it.
This gradual process is what can bring you to eat junk food that destroys your health, become really lazy, become very unproductive, and push you incredibly far away from your goals to the point of never achieving them.
I have poured over the scientific research on what you can do to optimize your life and body for peak performance.
I combined this with extensive research across thousands of interviews of the world’s most successful, top-performing individuals.
I wanted to share with you the top 5 things you can do immediately to radically change the course of your like and increase your chance of succeeding.
Let’s begin.
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Here are some of my favorite habits. I try to chain each to a trigger that I do already, like getting out of bed, brushing my teeth, or getting off from work to create a habit stacking routine.
1. Exercise daily.
This seems obvious but there’s so much more to it. I would not be making such an effort to exercise if I didn’t know the science behind its deep importance. That is what I want to tell you today.
Exercise has been shown to increase your levels of success in multiple areas of your life. Studies show that habitual, consistent exercise increases your level of happiness, reduces depression, reduces stress, increases your well-being, makes you more focused, makes you more productive, and gives you more energy.
Exercise has also been shown to be a keystone habit that is crucial to building habits. What does this mean? It means that if you can make exercise a habit, it will make it much easier to build a lot of other great habits.
2. Meditate
Before you jump to conclusions, I will admit that not everyone successful billionaire meditates. Richard Branson has admitted in a recent LinkedIn article that he does not meditate.
However, I have found a surprisingly large amount of people who meditate throughout studying thousands of the world’s peak performers.
There is a definite correlation of some type here. In fact, I’m constantly surprised when I find out more and more who do this every day. This list of people include: Robert Downey Jr., Ellen, Oprah Winfrey, Adam Levine, and more.
It’s crazy how many Western people have adopted this despite it being an Eastern practice. Coincidence?
The billionaire Ray Dalio credits meditation as his greatest investment on a daily basis. There’s actually a lot of science behind why meditation works. It helps clear your brain and actually creates physical structural changes that help you make more reasonable decisions in times of emotion. It helps disconnect emotion from reason when you need to most and it decreases your blood pressure.
3. Sleep More
There’s been decades of research on the benefits of sleep yet modern society has told everyone to work as hard as possible to succeed.
The average person thinks he or she works hard, when in reality you can catch them wasting 20+ hours a week on unproductive tasks. On top of that, they sacrifice a couple hours on their sleep from time to time to “get ahead.”
I’m not saying working harder and longer doesn’t help increase your chance of success. However, you get diminishing returns until the point of acting like you are drunk when you reduce your sleep.
If working harder is not working and sleeping less is not working, you should cut back a bit on how much you’re cuttting out and look to other ways of increasing your success, such as working smarter and focusing on the right things.
Elon Musk and Will Smith have worked 80+ hour weeks to g...

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