Name: How I Stick To My Habits (Without Discipline)
Uploaded: 2024-12-18T15:16:39.000Z
Duration: 10 min 7 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

This is my dopamine diary, and for the past few months I've been using this ridiculously easy beginner productivity technique to not only stop relying on discipline to stick with my goals and habits, but to actually break all of the bad habits that I had in my life.

So in this video, I want to share with you guys the three ridiculously straightforward steps that I took to set up my dopamine diary, so that you too can stop relying on discipline to stick with your Do you ever wonder why some people are able to stick with every single healthy habit they set, whilst people like you and me struggle with even the most basic things?

And this really got to me because I sort of fell off my health and fitness journey a few months ago, I stopped going to the gym as much, my diet kind of suffered, and I got a little bit upset that I couldn't stick with this habit.

So because I was feeling like I was stuck in this rut, I read, or rather listened to the audiobook of Atomic Habits by James Clear, and I figured out that there's just three simple things that you need to do to make a habit stick.

And the first thing was really obvious, but it's something I never even thought about, because we kind of know what we need to do right?

If we want to lose weight and get on that health journey, we know that we need to improve our diet and start exercising more, but all too often things just come up in life, whether that's answering emails, seeing an old friend, you know it could literally be anything that distracts us from these habits, and we do actually forget what we need to do.

So pretty quickly I realized that I needed a visual way to remind myself of all of the habits that I wanted to do, and that's why James Clear talks about the idea of a habit tracker.

But I'll be honest with you guys, I feel like that name is a little bit boring, so that's where I kind of designed a similar system with a few key differences, hence the name Dopamine Diary.

The best thing with this Dopamine Diary is, because they're in this kind of physical A6 notebook, I can just put it in my pocket and kind of take it out whenever I feel like it, wherever I am in the world, wherever I am, whatever I'm doing.

The next step to this Dopamine Diary is something that can influence not only your habits, but pretty much anything that you want to stick to in your life, and it's all to do with this kind of magical substance we all know about called dopamine.

And the thing is, even if you're a beginner in this whole kind of productivity space, you know, if you've got a job, maybe you're a student, you know that it's really important to use a to-do list.

And I'm the exact same, but you probably wonder why it's actually so effective, even though it's really, really simple.

And the whole idea is that when we tick off something on our to-do list, it gives us this little spike in dopamine, and it makes us feel good, right?

Because we've done something hard, our brain's rewarding us with, like, acknowledging that we've done that thing.

So in the Dopamine Diary, we have a really similar system.

And basically, every time I do one of these habits, I will just tick off that I've done it.

And it works in the same way as the to-do list, right?

So it will just give me that boost in dopamine and make me feel good and make me want to go on to the next habit.

But this next has been the most revolutionary part of the Dopamine Diary for me.

And because of it, I can practically guarantee that this is going to work for you, even if you're lazy.

I'm sure that you, too, must know somebody in your life that is just obsessed with video games.

And for whatever reason, they seem even more obsessed with kind of leveling up their character in this fictional world than focusing on themselves in real life.

And whilst that seems really counterintuitive, there is a ridiculously kind of simple, if not a little bit deceptive way that these video games kind of hack all of our attention and make us want to feel progress towards completing goals, completing tasks, then leveling up our character.

And when we apply this same principle to something that's actually important, you know, building habits, building worthwhile habits in our real life, well, that's going to make things a lot easier for you.

Well, the thing with video games is that most of them have a sort of tracker that gives you a sense of your progress over time.

And the way that you can actually apply this to your Dopamine Diary is by creating a new one every week.

So now you know why the Dopamine Diary is guaranteed to work for you and enable you to finally stick to your habits.

But, and there's a big caveat, because this is all in theory.

Because in reality, I can almost guarantee that you're going to make one of these three mistakes when setting the system up.

So let me tell you what they are so you know how to avoid them and also how to actually stick with all of your habits.

This first mistake is something that is absolutely crucial you avoid, because if you don't, you won't even be able to get started with the Dopamine Diary.

So if you're anything like me, you might use something like Notion to manage all of your life, but there's a huge problem with this.

And I've experienced this myself too, because oftentimes we can spend so long planning and designing these really pretty kind of productivity systems without actually doing the tasks that contribute towards actually being productive.

And the same is true with the Dopamine Diary.

And the thing is, it doesn't need to look super pretty, but the crucial thing you need to do is list the habits in the order from when you wake up to when you go to bed.

And this is just going to make it really easy to know exactly what you need to do from the moment you start the day to the moment you end the day.

The next mistake that you have to avoid if you want to make sure that the Dopamine Diary works for you is all to do with this little bit at the bottom of my notebook.

And you'll see here that at the bottom of my Dopamine Diary, I give each of my days of the week a score out of 11.

And this is one of my favorite parts of the system, because that means whenever I take my Dopamine Diary out, I can just get a really, really quick idea of how my week is going and crucially how my days were going in terms of sticking on top of my habits.

And the reason why this scoring system works so well in the Dopamine Diary is because we can then potentially look at changing our habits depending on how we're keeping up with them throughout the week.

The next mistake that you have to avoid when setting up your Dopamine Diary is something that I touched on a little bit earlier, and it's what James Clear calls the two-minute rule.

And this is going to make it basically impossible for you not to stick with any habit that you set for yourself.

If you remember what I said earlier, instead of putting on my Dopamine Diary the habit of going to the gym, I put on my workout clothes.

The reason why is pretty straightforward, because I think we're all fundamentally quite lazy people.

So we need a that makes things ridiculously easy to get started, because if you're anything like me, you know that you only start to feel motivated when you're actually doing the action.

It's that first bit that feels so hard to start with.

And the two-minute rule basically says that you want to break up your habit into the smallest thing possible.

So for example, here with me, I want to go to the gym.

But what's something I can do in two minutes that will contribute towards that?

And that's putting on my workout clothes.

And it's the exact same with any habit you might have.

By this point, you might be wondering how you can level up the Dopamine Diary, if you start to find it a little bit easy, or if you want to take it to that next level.

So I want to show you the three things that I've changed with the Dopamine Diary, to mean that I can actually stick with even more habits.

First up, you might be wondering why some of these habits are highlighted, and why they're in green, blue, and yellow.

And this is because I've been using a really simple, straightforward system to manage my life and ensure that I'm actually doing things that are going to make me feel fulfilled in the long term, but also in the day to day.

And that system is called the three pillars of life.

So if you look at my Dopamine Diary, the green contributes towards my wealth, the yellow contributes towards my health, and then the blue contributes towards my mindset.

And the reason why this works so well in the Dopamine Diary, is that I can aim for balance across all of these three pillars.

Now, I have a question for you, because for the longest time, I thought I was completely bonkers.

You know, do you ever wonder why some people just seem to wake up at 6am and start studying like it's nothing?

Or maybe you look at those people that are studying or working in the library at 2.30 in the middle of the night, and thinking they're completely crazy.

And this is really important, because the thing is, we're all different.

And as much as I would love for you to just copy my habits in my Dopamine Diary and have the same success, I don't think you can really do this.

Because at least for me, I know that I'm 100% a morning person.

And if I work on a project or try and do something hard late at night, I find myself just getting so unmotivated.

And my brain just keeps telling me that I can't do it and I'm not good enough.

So what really helped me, and I'm sure can help you is figuring out where you sit on this sort of divide between being a morning person and being a night person.

This is a little bit counterintuitive, but to start with, with your Dopamine Diary, you might just be listing down loads of healthy habits, things that are good for you.

But as we both know, sometimes it's even more important for your life to stop the negative habits than it is to start putting new, good, healthy habits on your plate.

And how you can use the Dopamine Diary to do this is just by putting down negative habits that you want to avoid.

The next thing that I wanted to use my Dopamine Diary for was to start to replace my phone addiction.

Because I noticed I was spending so much time just doom scrolling.

So to find out what simple steps I took to break my phone addiction and to break that doom scrolling habit, you're going to want to watch this video here.