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.
In her book, No Sweat: How the Simple Science of Motivation Can Bring You a Lifetime of Fitness, Michelle Segar encourages us to find “opportunities to move,” or OTMs for short. Finding OTMs means finding ways to do some additional physical movement throughout the day.1 The reasoning behind this is that we live very sedentary lives and being sedentary is bad for both our physical2 and mental health.3 Even if… Read More »OTMs
Isaac Newton’s first law of motion states that an object in motion tends to stay in motion, and an object at rest tends to stay at rest. A similar law exists for human productivity and behavioral change: A person who is moving in the right direction tends to keep moving in the right direction, and a person who is stuck tends to remain stuck. Actually, I left something out. Newton’s… Read More »You Can Build Momentum
New behaviors require willpower, and there’s no trick or technique that eliminates the need for willpower. But we can reduce the amount of willpower required to perform new behaviors using strategy. And one of the best strategies we can use is to reduce the number of decisions involved in performing the new behavior. This is critical because making decisions is mentally taxing, and we need to reserve our mental strength… Read More »Get Clear On When, Where, And How
Most behavioral change begins “tomorrow.” We say to ourselves things like: “I’ll start working out tomorrow.” “I’ll quit eating junk food tomorrow.” “I’ll begin that project tomorrow.” “I’ll read instead of watching TV tomorrow.” “I’ll make time to meditate tomorrow.” And the biggest lie of all: “It’ll be easier tomorrow.” Of course, when tomorrow arrives, we find another reason to delay. Tomorrow is always tomorrow, which means that the mythical… Read More »Don’t Start Tomorrow