Top 5 Tools for Creating Health Habits

Top 5 Tools for Creating Health Habits…!
Shuqiao Song
4/22/10
habits.stanford.edu

If you are a Sleepy, Stressed Student
…building healthy habits can be tough work. Here are some tools to enable you to
GET MOTIVATED,
make developing habits SIMPLE TO DO,
and give you the proper TRIGGERS
to help you remember to do them.
Check them out…!

1. trackyourhappiness.org
The site allows you to sign up for a service that randomly prompts you to reflect and answer a quick SMS or email survey about your happiness level at that moment. After about 50 evaluations, you are given a personal report of various factors affecting your happiness. The report/self reflection can motivate you figure out what stressful aspects of your life you might want to change.Happy is healthy.
Habit: Self Reflection
This website works well in helping you develop a habit of self reflection by prompting you unexpectedly with an appropriate facilitating notification and simple to use design.

2. sleep cycle alarm
Sleep is your best friend. And, drowsiness is RED ALERT!
Fortunately, for those students (w/iPhones) who want to get the most out of what little sleep they canget, there is Proactive Sleep (sleep sounds so productive!). Proactive Sleep is an application that gives you personalized information on your sleep habits and is designed to promote behaviors related to getting a good night’s sleep.
Habit: All things sleep related…Zzzz
This app works because it continuously assesses and facilitates your desired sleep behavior with appropriate triggers (e.g. timed alarms, vigilance game upon waking to assess drowsiness!, sleep diary, etc)

3. RSS/viral feeds of funny stuff
http://www.theonion.com/
http://www.collegehumor.com/
http://failblog.org/
http://www.cracked.com/
Habit: Laugh everyday.
Laughter is the best medicine. It helps relieve stress and boosts your immune system.
Getting an automatic feed of funny viral videos is the perfect signal trigger since you are already motivated (to procrastinate by watching hilarious stuff) and the behavior is simple to do with the click of a button.

4. “Share on Facebook” ?!
Checking facebook has become THE ultimate habit of students.
Fortunately, sharing your healthy habit forming progress often brings in lots of positive social support. You can get all kinds of support from friends and family by: forming/joining a group, creating/attending events, updating your status and getting comments/likes, etc.
Habit: Any healthy habit you want to share/get support for
Sharing with others about your goals forces you to hold yourself more accountable and provides you with positive reinforcement. In addition, tying in aspects of a new habit (e.g. logging running activity) with an existing habit helps you trigger the new habit.

5. vivecoach.com
Vive coach is a free online service that lets you make “game plans” and set your own SMS or email reminders.
Habit: All things health related. Fitness, Diet, etc.
Works because it makes it easy for you to: develop plans, track progress, and set your own triggers!

Good luck with developing your healthy habits and remember these tools…!
1. trackyourhappiness.org
2. proactivesleep.com
3. RSS/viral feeds of funny stuff
4. share your habit forming progress on Facebook!
5. vivecoach.com
habits.stanford.edu

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Top 5 Tools for Creating Health Habits

by S. Song on Apr 22, 2010

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