Chris Loper has been writing about self-improvement and helping busy adults with habit formation since 2017. He also writes an education blog for parents and students for Northwest Educational Services. Along with Greg Smith, Chris is the cocreator of Parenting for Academic Success, a series of transformative classes that create empowered parents, confident students, and harmonious families. His most recent endeavor combines his academic and habit-formation expertise to help students thrive in college. Visit SmartCollegeHabits.com to learn more. In 2021, Chris published a humorous memoir titled Wood Floats and Other Brilliant Observations, a book that blends crazy stories with practical life lessons. He lives in Issaquah, WA where he is the owner of South Cove Tutoring.
The biggest obstacle to habit formation is inconsistency. Remember, creating a habit is like bushwhacking a new trail through the forest: If you don’t retrace your steps frequently, the path will quickly become overgrown and lost. The gold standard for overcoming this obstacle is to do the same thing, at the same time, in the same place, every single day. If you can do that, you’ll have a rock-solid habit.… Read More »The Two Kinds of Daily Habits
It’s New Year’s Day at 9am. The sky is overcast. The air is a crisp 42 degrees. We’re standing at the end of a dock on Lake Washington. We strip down to our swimsuits and jump in. Splash! The water is bitingly cold, almost painful. We stay in as long as we can – which isn’t very long – and dry ourselves off on the dock. It takes a long… Read More »Discomfort is Inevitable
“The pain that’s created by avoiding hard work is actually much worse than any pain created from the actual work itself.” –Russel Simmons1 Procrastinating comes with many costs. One is “the thinking cost” – the taxing mental exercise of thinking about whatever you’re not doing, coming up with excuses to not do it, and then feeling guilty about procrastinating as you choose a more pleasant task. The longer you put… Read More »The Pain of Procrastination
What are feelings? What is pain, pleasure, hot, cold, an itch, or a tickle? On a purely physical level, feelings are just nerve signals – neurons firing in your body to communicate with your brain. What about feelings within your brain? Fear, confidence, sadness, happiness, and the like? These are just nerve signals too – patterns of neurons firing in your brain. Nerve signals are neutral. There is nothing inherently… Read More »They’re Just Nerve Signals