You can cultivated good habits & break bad ones by manipulating each step of the Habit Loop.
The basic Habit Loop is cue → craving → response → reward. You can manipulate each step in this process to help adopt good habits and break bad ones.
Cue
Make habit triggers obvious. Setup your environment to expose good cues often, and hide bad cues. Be very specific with when and how you will perform a habit. Try stacking a habit you aspire to do with one you already do.
Example: Place moisturizer next to the coffee machine. Tell yourself “after each time I press ‘brew’, I will moisturize my hands”.
Craving
Make good habits attractive. Use temptation bundling to stack good habits with things you enjoy (ensuring the good habit and the thing you enjoy don’t cast conflicting votes toward your new identity). Also you can associate with people who already have the habit you want.
Example: “Only after my weekly review of budgets, will l watch the new episode of my TV show.”
Response
Make the good habit easy & the bad habit hard. Tailor the environment to add or remove friction where possible. Many good habits can be automated & bad habits prevented via one-time actions. Quantity is often more important than quality. You’d benefit more from never failing to meet a daily goal of “do a 2 minute warmup” than from consistently failing to meet a daily goal “do a one hour workout”… and you’ll often find after you do the warmup it’s often easy to do the workout.
Example: Unplug the TV after each use and set your journal on the power cable. Commit to writing two sentences before plugging in the TV.
Reward
Make it immediately satisfying to perform a good habit by using rewards. Habit trackers can supplement rewards, and be rewards themselves. Make bad habits painful by using a habit contract and an accountability partner.
Example: After finishing my workout, I will make myself a healthy smoothie and put an X on the calendar next to the blender. If I fail to put 3 Xes in any week this month, I have to do the whole family’s laundry by myself next month.