Top Highlights

• the consensus is that making incremental changes to your habits is the key to sustainable results.
• the only thing you really need to start is a pen and paper to draw up your initial plan and track your goals.
• Gardner tells me that we develop habitual patterns because it is our brain’s way of locking in useful responses. He describes people as “cognitive misers,” meaning, we like (and need) to conserve our mental resources so that we can then use those resources on other, more mindful tasks. He gives an example:
• As well as being aware of the cues for certain habits, we should also be conscious of the (often temporary) rewards that we gain from the behavior and how these rewards can influence our desire to repeat the behavior in the future.
• Change can be emotionally triggering, and it is a very human response to fear and resist anything that takes you out of your comfort zone, even if you know deep down that the change would benefit you.