There is a common phenomenon in the world of personal finance called lifestyle creep.
It describes our tendency to buy bigger, better, and nicer things as our income rises.
What if we adapted this concept to the rest of our lives in a beneficial way?
This post originally appeared onJames Clears blog.
What was once out of reach will become your new normal.
Yet, lifestyle creep describes a very reliable way that human behavior changes over the long-term.
Maybe theres a way to adapt this concept to the rest of our lives.
Changing Your Normal
Lets list some typical financial goals.
I want to own designer jeans.
I want to have a bigger house.
I want to drive a faster car.
When our purchasing power goes up, our purchases tend to go up too.
What if similar side effects could happen in other areas of life?
Consider these goals:
I want to add 10 pounds of muscle.
I want to find a partner and get married.
I want to earn six figures per year.
I want to get a higher score on my test.
I want to own a successful business.
In other words, as our normal habits improved, so would our results.
Similarly, if you adopt a bunch of new behaviors you cant sustain, thats not habit creep.
In other words, the key is to avoid the trap of trying to grow too fast.
Lifestyle creep happens so slowly that it is almost imperceptible.
Habit creep should be the same way.
Your goal is to nudge your behaviors along in very small ways.
In my experience, there are two primary ways to change long-term behaviors and improve performance for good.
Increase your performance by a little bit each day.
(Most people take this to the extreme.)
Change your environment to remove small distractions and barriers.
(Most people never think about this.)
Here are some thoughts on each one:
Increasing your performance.You have a normal way of living.
Lets say that your standard day requires you walk 8,000 steps.
But the habit creep approach would be to add a very small amount to your standard behavior.
Say, 8,100 steps per day rather than 8,000 steps.
you could apply this logic to nearly any area of life.
We eat cookies because they are on the counter.
We pick up our phones because someone sends us a text.
We turn on TV because its the first thing we look at when we sit on the couch.
Imagine if you made one positive environment change each week.
Where would your life creep to by the end of the year?
The results you enjoy on your best day are typically a reflection of how you spend your normal day.
I say forget that stuff.
Just improve your normal day and the results will take care of themselves.
We naturally make long-term changes in our lives by slowly and slightly adjusting our normal everyday habits and behaviors.
Image byRoman Beresnev(Shutterstock).
