There’s a saying that goes, “if you can dream it, you can achieve it”. It’s important to fulfil your potential and pursue your goals, but the self-motivation to do so can be overwhelming. Regardless, making a year that’s fulfilling is within your reach if you can balance your passion with practical steps.
Students fist bumping for a new lifestyle to adapt
4 Simple Steps to Implement a New Lifestyle
1. Start With Something Small
While there is nothing wrong with thinking big when it comes to taking action and making progress, starting small is the key. If you want to build healthy lifestyle habits for the long term, it is better to start small. Starting small requires less time and energy. When a task is simple, you’re less likely to procrastinate. Likewise, the little victories from small tasks will make you feel good. And when you feel good, it gives you the motivation to do more, which will eventually lead to something big!
2. Ignore the Inner Excuses and Self-Pity
When things don’t go our way, and others seem to have a greater advantage than us, creating excuses and responding with self-pity might be a habit for some of us. Self-pity is excessive, self-absorbed unhappiness over our own troubles. Often, people mistake it as part of human emotion when in reality, it’s our method of judgement ― of the unhealthy kind. To tackle the temptation of pitying oneself, label what you’re truly feeling and work it out from there. If you’re pitying yourself for not achieving as much as your peers did, what is your actual feeling behind that self-pity? If let’s say, you’re sad about it ― is that sadness subconsciously influenced by how you view success, or something else? Take time to reflect on yourself, and it will help you implement a happier, healthier millennial lifestyle.
3. Sacrifice at Least One Bad Habit
Small, bad behaviours, when accumulated, can have a negative impact in the long run. Your bad habits are likely to negatively affect your productivity and lifestyle choices as a university student. Getting rid of bad habits is difficult because they are already ingrained in memory. Doing things on a regular basis conditions your neurons to make your actions automatic. Replace the bad habit with one good habit, preferably one that rewards you in the long term. According to neurobiologist Dr Russell Poldrack, doing something repeatedly, especially pleasure-based activities, reinforces the habit. Developing good habits that involve enjoyable activities typically leads to the release of dopamine, creating the craving to perform these good habits again. Choose one bad habit to replace, and continuously carry out the action or activity until your brain acknowledges a better, new habit has taken place.
4. Develop a Love of Learning
Curiosity acts as the motivating force to seek out new information, but sometimes it doesn’t go far. The love of learning, however, is the desire to hold on to that information and go deeper into it. Developing a love of learning is contemplative, bringing the learner to critical thinking as part of a self-enhancement journey. More often than not, students aim only to meet the bare minimum of academics, that is to score good grades. When one delves deeper into what they are learning by asking questions and doing independent research in their free time, it will benefit them greatly in their academic, social, and work life.
Whatever challenges that come, you’re responsible for making 2020 a year different from other years, including equipping yourself with relevant knowledge for impactful, lifelong application.
Likewise, INTI International University (INTI) understands the importance of continuous learning, especially in the midst of the pandemic. INTI’s Blackboard Learning Management System, a systematic means to engage with students across INTI’s campuses, combines both conventional and digital learning through one convenient platform! Students are able to engage in discussions, obtain information and prepare for their assignments beyond the classroom and through the touch of a button.
Click here to find out how the Blackboard Learning Management System has helped our students with education continuity during the Covid-19 pandemic.