What is a Keystone Habit?

Keystone habits are habits or practices that create widespread positive changes in a person’s life. They positively impact a person’s overall daily routine, mindset, and well-being. Keystone habits have a domino effect, creating a positive cascade by influencing multiple areas of life that can lead to bigger transformative growth.

The act of implementing a values-based goal and building a helpful habit requires a set of skills that can positively impact one’s life beyond the specific goal itself. For example, organization, time management, and discipline are needed to carve out time for, and engage in, regular exercise. As a result of these skills, your work schedule may be more organized and efficient too.

Focusing on helpful goals can also create a beneficial shift in your mindset. As you implement the goal and notice a useful impact, you may feel more confident and accomplished and may become more optimistic in general.

Examples of Keystone Habits

Here is a list of examples of keystone habits that are guaranteed to have a ripple effect:

Planning Your Time

Taking time at the start of the day or the week and planning out your time can help to highlight your priorities, enable you to focus on them, and be more organized, efficient, and productive. It can also lead to scheduling other helpful habits such as exercise and mindfulness meditation.

Consistent Exercise

Exercise positively impacts physical health by improving cardiovascular fitness and strengthening muscles and bones. It also great benefits for our emotional well-being by reducing stress, anxiety, and depression.

Regular exercise can inspire helpful change, which, as noted above, is what makes a habit a keystone habit. It also improves sleep, enhances self-esteem, and increases focus and mental clarity, all of which will contribute to other areas in life too.

Mindfulness Meditation

Mindfulness meditation can lead to reduced stress, improved focus, and emotional resilience. It teaches you to observe your experience without judgment and reconnect with the present moment when distracted by thoughts.

Meditation can help us feel physically and emotionally grounded, which can lead to less emotional overwhelm. It also allows you to be more present which can improve relationships and increase focus and productivity by decreasing distractions and mental scatter.

Simply put, a keystone habit is a habit that helps the rest of your life run more smoothly.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Keystone Habits

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) focuses on the relationship between thoughts, emotions, and behaviors and can help you create and implement keystone habits.

When creating a goal and developing a habit over time, it is important to clarify what it is, specifically, that you want to do and why it is important to you. You also want to notice any unhelpful thoughts that may hinder your goal implementation and challenge and change these thoughts to be more helpful. For example, you may automatically tell yourself you don’t have time to start a new goal and don’t stop to consider that it may be doable if it is small.

Next, you need to ensure your goal is specific, realistic, and small – you can always add to it later. It is important to track your progress over time so you can make helpful adjustments as needed.

It takes time, effort, and dedication to consistently engage in values-based behaviors and develop keystone habits, and setbacks are part of the process. Nonetheless, it is possible to use evidence-based strategies to create keystone habits that improve your well-being and life.

This Psychology Today article provides an overview of strategies for implementing goals consistently and creating lasting change.

To learn more about effective techniques for developing keystone habits, please contact us at CBT Denver.