Habits for health and happiness are often the quiet, underrated game-changers in life. While quick fixes grab the spotlight, the real secret lies in the power of habits that shape our bodies, minds, and relationships.
If you’re looking for simple health and happiness tips, it all starts with building daily habits for happiness and consistent habits for better health – small actions that quietly rewrite your future. Read on to know more about the power of habits.
KEY POINTS
- The quality of our life closely reflects the quality of our habits.
- Habits work through repetition, gradually molding our thoughts, behaviors, and relationships.
- Research shows that the core habits contributing to good physical health also contribute to good mental health.
Increasingly lost amid the 24/7 frenzy of modern life is an important but unglamorous truth: most of our quality of life results from the routine physical, emotional, interpersonal, and mental habits we engage in each day.
Advertising to the contrary, habits, not hacks, are the real secrets to success, health, love, progress, and fulfillment.
Related: How to Be Happy with What You Have According To Psychology
Consider a few examples:
- While millions of people pursue dreams of prosperity by purchasing lottery tickets—a strategy whose success probability approaches zero—financial experts have long since identified the fundamental habits of wealth building, such as spending less than one earns, smart and consistent investment, use of compounding interest, and maintaining a long-term financial perspective.1
- CRISPR technology is amazing, but gene therapies do not solve most modern health problems. Research conclusively demonstrates, for example, that less than half of our lifespan is explained by genetic factors.2 Our lifestyle and environmental exposure habits explain most of our longevity potential.
- Greek mythology notwithstanding, romantic love is rarely the instantaneous result of Cupid’s arrow or Love Potion Number 9. Instead, love is demonstrably more likely to result from habits in our communication and behavior towards prospective intimate partners.3
The above illustrates just a few of the many instances where the slow force of habits exceeds the effects of even the most popular or expensive quick-fix remedies.
Just how powerful are habits? For the typical person, there is no single greater source of influence on their quality of life.
Right now, beneath our noses (literally; you probably underestimate the physical and emotional effects of your breathing habits),4 and conscious awareness, habits are nudging our choices, compelling our actions, shaping our results, and, ultimately, deciding our destinies.
If habits were part of your home, they would be the foundation. If your life were a train, habits would be the tracks on which it traveled.
And if your level of health and happiness were depicted as a farm, habits would comprise the quality of your seed and soil.
The science is clear: if you want a better life, you need better habits.5
7 Habits for Health and Happiness That Actually Change Your Life
The seven habits of health and happiness.
If certain habits reliably produce wealth, increase lifespan, and foster love, there must also be habits promoting happiness and health.
Not surprisingly, studies confirm precisely this prediction; certain habits predispose happiness and health, whereas the opposing habits prejudice us towards depression and disease.
The most practical and persuasive finding from the habit literature, however, is that habits perpetuate happiness and health and that the habits of mental well-being and happiness and the habits of physical health are mostly the same habits.6
Research shows that cardinal habits related to:
- Sleep
- Self-talk
- Physical activity
- Relationships
- Nutrition
- Goal-setting
- Stress management/coping
… either predispose our risk for depression and disease (figure above) or promote our capacity for happiness and health (figure below). Collectively, these seven habits function as the nucleus of our quality of life.
Habits comprise our mental and physical health foundation because of their repetitive influence.
Although no single instance of exercise, healthy self-talk, or act of kindness toward our spouse, for example, may seem particularly significant, when repeated over time, habits’ effects compound into remarkable results.
For comparison, consider that gravity is invisible yet relentless enough to bend light and shape the universe.
Water is mindless, yet it can gradually erode even the tallest mountain. And habits are unconscious, yet their quiet consistency molds our futures as skillfully as a sculptor carves a block of clay.
Related: How to Be Happy, Even When You Least Expect It
Summary
If the power of habits were expressed in a children’s story, they would be best represented by the humble tortoise from Aesop’s fable—discreet and unassuming, yet as reliable as Newton’s laws of physics.
Facing 21st-century threats of rapid change and future uncertainty, habits are the steady and redoubtable force we can still count on to improve the quality of our lives.
References:
1. Clason, G. S. 1. (1955). The richest man in Babylon. New York, Hawthorne Books.
2. Bin-Jumah MN, Nadeem MS, Gilani SJ, Al-Abbasi FA, Ullah I, Alzarea SI, Ghoneim MM, Alshehri S, Uddin A, Murtaza BN, Kazmi I. Genes and Longevity of Lifespan. Int J Mol Sci. 2022 Jan 28;23(3):1499. doi: 10.3390/ijms23031499
3. Gottman, John Mordechai (1999). The seven principles for making marriage work. Nan Silver (1st ed.). New York: Crown Publishers. ISBN 0-609-60104-0.
4. Zaccaro A, Piarulli A, Laurino M, Garbella E, Menicucci D, Neri B, Gemignani A. How Breath-Control Can Change Your Life: A Systematic Review on Psycho-Physiological Correlates of Slow Breathing. Front Hum Neurosci. 2018 Sep 7;12:353. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2018.00353.
5. Wood W, Rünger D. Psychology of Habit. Annu Rev Psychol. 2016;67:289-314. doi: 10.1146/annurev-psych-122414-033417.
6. Steptoe A. Happiness and Health. Annu Rev Public Health. 2019 Apr 1;40:339-359. doi: 10.1146/annurev-publhealth-040218-044150.
Written By Thomas Rutledge Ph.D.
Originally Appeared On Psychology Today
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