Triggers, The Cue, and others in How to Change a Habit

This is a review or are some notes of How to Change a Habit's Book by Scott Young

The Notes are:

Triggers
It is The first advanced tool for making habit changes stick. A trigger is simply understanding and reinforcing the cue that starts your habit. Before you can use a trigger to make your habits more resilient, you need to understand how a habit works.

What most people consider a habit, isn’t one habit, but many minor habits linked together. These minor habits are small links of thought and behavior that form a larger pattern you generally call a habit. Although smoking may be seen as a habit by some, it is actually many habits linked together. The chain of habits for smoking might be:
1. Feel the impulse for a cigarette
2. Look for cigarette
3. Pull cigarette out
4. Light cigarette
5. Smoke

The goal of creating a trigger, is to make a highly consistent ritual based on some initial stimulus that automatically redirects your behavior. The ritual has to be short, simple and highly focused to lead to the new habit you want to install. A trigger you create for your habit has two components, your cue and your ritual.

The Cue
The cue is a piece of stimulus that precedes your habit, like the bell for Pavlov's dogs. Some habits have a fairly uniform cue, while others may have a couple different initial signals. This may sound a bit complex but the cue for your trigger is actually fairly simple.

Consider you want a habit of waking up early, what would be your cue? This has to be one of the easiest: the sound of your alarm clock. That sound of your alarm clock is a universal piece of stimulus that gives you the option of waking up. If you wanted a habit trigger for an early riser habit, the alarm clock would be an obvious cue....

The best cues are external (time of day, alarm clock, after tasks, work, etc.) but when there aren’t any consistent external cues for when you should perform your habit, you need to look for internal cues. Internal cues are harder to make triggers, but they will work.

The Ritual
This is the most important part of your trigger. This should be a concise set of actions no more than fifteen minutes long, and often it can be as little as a few seconds. Your ritual needs to be strongly associated with your habit, so it should be done every time in the same fashion.

Because rituals develop naturally, consciously using a trigger is the process of ensuring two things: practice and consistency.

Practicing Your Ritual.....LINK (or Download)