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MB #066: 4-steps to build habits, why we sleep, and Abrahamic hospitality
Use these 4 steps to build (or break) any habit
Chris Cirullo
June 16, 2024
Read Time: ~5 Minutes
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Are you a founder/business owner, business leader, CEO or executive, who desires to get and stay healthy without sacrificing your family or your business?
Good news.
This will be an awesome way to start down that path and is designed specifically for business owners and high-level leaders.
It's called The Executive Fitness Blueprint: 5 Steps to Improved Fitness, More Energy, and Radical Health.
Today’s newsletter at a glance:
📈 Health Tips: How to build habits
🧠 Food for thought: Find a way or find an excuse
✍️ Quote: Leonard Ravenhill
📚 Book: Why We Sleep
📱Social Media: 1 health practice + Abrahamic hospitality
There are few things you can spend your time doing that have more benefit to every area of your life than exercise.
Exercise can improve your mood, blood sugar, metabolism, energy levels, creativity, work ethic, discipline, focus, hormones, strength, heart health, relationships, and more.
However, developing the habit of consistent exercise is challenging for most people.
So today I’m going to outline a framework for how to understand what’s happening when you try to create these habits (or break old ones) and how to get started on the track towards a more solidified habit of exercise.
The process of building a habit can be divided into four simple steps: cue, craving, response, and reward. When we understand the pieces of the puzzle we can more effectively work toward developing the habits we want.
The cue is something that triggers your brain to want to initiate a certain behavior.
The craving is the motivation, it’s the desire to achieve a specific reward that wells up inside of us. Usually subconsciously.
The response is the action we instinctively take as a result of the cue and craving that moves us towards the reward that your brain expects based on past patterns it has noticed.
The reward is what we the goal.
Put another way, the cue is about noticing the possible reward, the craving is about desiring to obtain it, and the response is the effort to obtain it.
Most of our life is driven by subconscious habits that have this loop baked into them through experience.
For instance, struggling to cut refined sugar out of your diet? It’s because starting from an early age your brain has hardwired a loop. 1.) See and smell sweet things. 2.) Crave the taste and the euphoric feeling it gives. 3.) Go eat the sweet thing. 4.) Experience the taste and euphoric feeling.
In order to develop a habit around exercise, you need to set up systems to support the cues, cravings, response, and rewards needed to move you towards a habit.