How to be a high performer: make these habits part of your everyday life

Think about your work life. You have a target for the next 12 months. You make a strategy, then a plan. You create spreadsheets and objectives, gather what you need – software, hardware, people – and set up KPIs and regular check-ins. Then each day you figure out what you need to do.

But when it comes to making changes to your lifestyle, you think “I will exercise more” and hope for the best. There’s nothing wrong with your willpower or personality. You just haven’t used the right tools.

Now a growing body of research into habits and behaviour is discovering the mental equipment we need to trick our minds into doing hard things.

The human mind has a so-called negativity bias where it focuses more on bad experiences. That means that if you set a goal to change, life’s inevitable setbacks overshadow progress and – with no contingency plan – erode your commitment.

“You have tens of thousands of thoughts a day and the majority are negative and subconscious,” says Jeremy Howick professor of empathic healthcare at the University of Leicester and author of The Power of Placebos. He’s been studying the ways people change their health without drugs for 20 years and is also the author of Doctor You: Introducing the Hard Science of Self-Healing.

One way to shut the negative thoughts out is to meditate regularly, he says. “While you can’t change your negative thoughts, meditation helps you realise they’re only thoughts, they come and go and have no meaning.” But you need to do it regularly and that’s not for everyone. “There are easier ways to short-circuit your subconscious negative thoughts and make doing the things you find difficult more automatic,” he says.

“You don’t just brush your teeth when they’re dirty. Behaviour change is a daily thing. if you don’t practise regularly, your instinctive negative mind’s going to take over and you’ll be a big negative mess.”

“Think of your mind like a car,” says Howick. For most of the day you’ve got your foot on the accelerator, working, meeting deadlines, tending to family, commuting. Then you get tired and overwhelmed and your mind goes into reverse gear making you more prone to negative thinking and unhealthy behaviours such as reaching for wine or chocolate or social media rabbit holes.

Getting overtired can sabotage the most ambitious health goals, he says. “Taking time each day to get your mind into neutral with some relaxation is good mental hygiene, like brushing your teeth for the mind.”

In accelerate-and-reverse mode, you’re operating from your fight-or-flight response, governed by your sympathetic nervous system which helps you get things done but also releases stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol. For Howick, neutral gear for the mind is when you rest. “You’re letting the parasympathetic nervous system take over for a while, which is the rest and digest part of your mind that helps you recharge, renew and get energised,” he says.

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Along with daily meditation, other ways to get into the relaxation response include daily gratitude journalling, which can be as simple as naming three things you’re grateful for every night, doing yoga nidra (yogic wakeful sleep – YouTube has many examples) and daily altruism (see next section).

Remember kindness? Engaging in acts of altruism can disrupt negative thought patterns and improve mood. ”The easiest way to stop the conscious and subconscious negative thoughts from crippling your plans is to do something daily for someone who’s in need.

“This transcends your own ego, puts you in a positive frame of mind and makes it more likely you’ll override negative thoughts that stop you practising your healthy habit – but the two don’t have to be related.” It could be anything from helping a neighbour to volunteering, to giving someone a compliment and meaning it. One 2019 study used imaging studies to show that doing kind things for others could reduce pain pathways in the brain.

If you enjoy something, you’re much more likely to repeat it, says Dr Heather McKee, a behavioural change psychologist. “Take something you have less motivation to do like going to the gym and pair it with something you love that makes it more fun and you will eventually associate the more difficult behaviour with the thing you enjoy and make it easier,” says Dr McKee. “In time, that increases your ‘intrinsic’ or in-built motivation to repeat it.”

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Examples include watching your favourite Netflix series while batch-cooking healthy meals on a Sunday and having an uplifting playlist with your favourite club tunes for your tough gym workouts.

“Thinking about the positive end-state you get from something that’s difficult is known as intrinsic reward,” says McKee. “This creates a craving to engage with the more difficult thing because, in your mind, it will result in a good feeling. That’s the opposite of thinking ‘Oh drat, I need to run up that hill’, or ‘How awful that I’m missing this TV show to get an early night’.”

Examples of intrinsic focus rewards include thinking how that walk outside will help you sleep tonight or how the workout will help you forget your bad mood.

First identified by Charles Duhigg in his 2012 book The Power of Habit, the habit loop distills what motivates us to repeat something into a simple equation. A cue acts as a trigger, repeating the behaviour becomes a routine and a reward is the pay-off you get.

Say you want to go for a walk every morning. Making a stack of walking clothes by the bed is a cue, planning to walk for 6.30am is the routine and the reward is how much more energised you feel at work. How you set your rewards matters too. “Rewards are more powerful when they’re the result of the behaviour rather than something unrelated,” McKee says. “For example, ‘If I go for a bike ride, I’ll get a view of nature’ instead of, ‘I’ll give myself a bar of chocolate’.”

You can’t think your way fitter, slimmer or smarter. You need to repeat a behaviour to get there. Not once. Not twice. But a lot – until it becomes automatic. There’s no other way, so in the early days, you need to make it feel good so you’ll keep coming back, Dr McKee suggests.

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Dopamine is a brain chemical that governs pleasure and it’s released when we have sex, gamble, snort cocaine or eat chocolate. “Immediate pleasurable feelings after doing the new behaviour can fast-track habit success by triggering dopamine, which makes you want to do it again.”

But in reality, we’re usually doing the opposite. “If you’ve set unrealistic goals you probably beat yourself up for not doing enough. For example, ‘That was a poor effort, I only did 13 minutes and the goal was 30. I’m rubbish’. That’s making you feel bad so you won’t want to do it again.”

The 30 to 60 seconds after the behaviour is the prime time for the dopamine response, so give yourself something good in that window. “Just ticking it off a to-do list with a smiley face gives you a dopamine hit, or taking a picture of your biceps after a workout – anything that can give you a little gleeful ‘ping’ after will reinforce a positive connection with the behaviour,” says Dr McKee.

Forget motivation, say change psychologists, because waiting for it can mean waiting forever. You need ”implementation intention” – aka a plan.

It has to be detailed and include where, when and how you will do the behaviour as well as contingencies for problems that will arise. “Including what obstacles might get in the way and planning specific ways you will overcome them is central,” says Dr McKee. “For example, if I’m trying to develop a running habit, and one day it’s raining, what are my alternatives?’’

It works best if you do it weekly and put a contingency plan into a diary. In fact, research published in the British Journal of Psychology found that people who set implementation intentions were 91 per cent more likely to exercise, compared with 35-38 per cent of those who use motivation alone.

McKee suggests the “If, then” formula. “If I get stuck on a deadline and can’t hit the gym tonight, then I’ll do half an hour of body weight training at home” or “If there’s birthday cake at work and I can’t say no, then I’ll cook extra vegetables with dinner.”