Ramadan is the best time to break old habits and create new ones.
Your entire routine is going to be disrupted anyways. When you sleep, when you wake up, what you eat, how much you spend — it’s all going to change in Ramadan.
How can you use Ramadan as a platform to make permanent changes in your life?
In this lesson we’re going to look at:
- Why breaking bad habits is much harder than you think
- Why relying on will power is a terrible strategy
- How to break down a habit and get rid of it once and for all
- How to find easy money on your budget by resetting your spending habits
- How to direct more of your mindless spending to charity
Lesson 4 - How to Reset Your Spending Habits [Audio]
Part 1: Why Habits Take a Long Time to Break
Studies have shown that 40% of everything you do every day is a routine habit.
How often do you forget to brush your teeth in the morning?
How often do you forget to get dressed for work?
You’ve been doing those for years or decades, it will be hard to forget to do a lot of things you do all the time because they’re engrained in you.
Bad habits are no different than good habits. If you’ve been doing something for a long time, good or bad, it will take time to break that habit.
The mistake everyone makes when they want to change their habits like smoking, eating better or going to the gym is assuming that all they need to do is be disciplined.
When people fail at changing their habits, they’re told that they just don’t have enough willpower which is wrong and feels bad.
Willpower spends mental energy
There are a lot of studies that require people to exert willpower so the researchers can test what happens to people’s brains and bodies.
What we learn over and over is that willpower is very limited.
Using willpower takes mental energy.
When mental energy is used to for willpower, there is less mental energy to do other stuff like math or being nice.
Habits by definition have been a part of your life for a long time and will therefore take a long time to change. The studies show that you will run out of willpower before your bad habits are changed. So don’t try to change your habits using willpower.
To break a bad habit, you first must understand how habits work.
Part 2: Three Parts to a Habit
Trigger
Before you start a habitual action, something triggers it. Once the trigger happens, you follow your routine and carry out the habit.
Action
The target habit, which should be easy to identify
Reward
Even the worst habits have their rewards. Be honest about what you get from doing the bad habit. If you don’t acknowledge and deal with the reward from your bad habits, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
Here are some examples:
Trigger | Action | Reward |
Email from Amazon | Shop on their site and buy something you don’t need | Anticipation of new shipment until it arrives |
Frustrated about co-worker | Smoke | Break from work and annoying coworker |
Hungry, no lunch prepared and colleague asks to go eat | Get expensive take-out lunch | Eat food, hang out with co-worker, take a break |
Bored | Eat junk food | Regret |
Take action: Fill out the Habit Change Worksheet with the habits that you want to identify and change this Ramadan and beyond. (Word version of the Habit Change Worksheet)
Part 3: Two Ways to Break a Bad Habit
1. Replace the action that has the same trigger and reward
This way of breaking a bad habit will require you put on your thinking cap. If you were honest with yourself about the triggers and rewards that you get for each habit, then half the job is done.
The question that you have left to answer is: What can I do that can give me the same reward and have the same trigger as the bad habit I’m trying to replace?
But the real help that Ramadan will provide comes in the next method to break a bad habit.
2. Eliminate the trigger
Some habit cycles are better being eliminated altogether. This is what people normally try to do when changing their life. But the right way to do it still requires some thought.
Instead of having a bad habit triggered, then trying to resist the temptation of the habit you’re not supposed to do; like buying another book on Amazon that you aren’t going to read, eliminate the trigger instead.
Remember, you only have a limited supply of willpower, and using it will drain limited mental resources that you could use for work or being patient with your family. So don’t try to resist the temptation of a bad habit after the cycle has been triggered. Find out what the trigger is and eliminate that.
Exercise: The chart with habit examples above has two habits that would be best broken with method 1 and two with method 2. Can you figure out which is which?
Ramadan will break a lot of triggers for you
What are the things you spend money on that you won’t be doing during Ramadan? Those are easy habits that Ramadan will force you to break by eliminating the trigger.
If you normally grab breakfast on the way to work in the morning; you won’t be doing that during Ramadan because you’re fasting. You can decide to take that money and donate it.
If you normally go out to lunch with your colleagues at work; you won’t be doing that during Ramadan because you’re fasting. You can take that money and donate it.
If you normally go out shopping on the weekends; you won’t be doing much of that during Ramadan because you’ll probably be too tired. You can take that money and donate it.
There are a lot of spending habits you have that won’t be triggered in Ramadan because your schedule and routine will be upside down in Ramadan. Use that to your advantage by being mindful of where you aren’t spending money during Ramadan.
Put this in action
This might all sound good in theory, but in order for you to be mindful of how much you could give in charity this Ramadan, we need to know how much money you have to work with.
Remember the jar analogy from last lesson? We’re going to put that to work in the next lesson by answering three questions:
- How big is your jar (how much you make a month)?
- How many pebbles do you have (what are your bills)?
- How much of what’s left do you want to give to charity?
When you’re finished working on your Habit Change Worksheet, head on over to Lesson 5. Here’s the Word version of the Habit Change Worksheet.
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