Habits – a routine of behavior practiced frequently and often subconsciously – can significantly affect the quality of a person’s life. Whether you plan to change a behavior or create a new habit, tracking your progress is one way to stick to your goals long-term.
Recent research suggests that people who have used habit tracking apps to track their study habits have successfully developed new study habits. The more they repeated the new behavior, the more motivated they were to stick to their goals without distraction.
There are many habit tracking apps for tracking habits, and not all are created equal. Below are expert-recommended habit tracking apps that might be worth downloading.
What is Habit Tracking?
“Habit tracking uses a tracking method to motivate people to do the things they want to do,” says Kendall Roach, a licensed professional counselor in Springfield, Missouri, and a Babylon mental health specialist. He explains that this could involve either stopping bad habits or creating new, healthy ones.
Tracking habits can be as simple as keeping a journal to record patterns and notes when you’ve completed an activity. Or you can choose one of the many habit tracking apps that offer tools like timely reminders and personalized statistics to visualize your progress.
In general, the following steps can help you build new habits or break old ones:
- Identify and set specific goals that are beneficial to your well-being.
- Decide on a simple action you can take daily to achieve your goals.
- Include specifics, such as when (time) and where (place) you will perform the action. Keep it consistent – aim for the same time, and the same place every day.
Research suggests that if you consistently stick with your new habits, within 10 weeks it can become an automatic behavior – and you can do them without thinking.
Benefits of Tracking Habits
Tracking habits can offer a number of benefits, including:
- Increase automaticity: Tracking can encourage you to do a certain habit repeatedly. Research has shown that repeating habits increase automation. If you are building a positive habit, the more you practice the behavior, the easier it will be to continue the habit without thinking or planning. When a habit becomes automatic, motivational conflicts (such as distracting thoughts) are reduced, increasing your commitment to whatever habit you are forming.
- Encouraging mindfulness and self-reflection: Tracking habits help you be fully present and bring your attention to the things you’re doing. This gives space to reflect on your behavior and its reasons. “When we engage in a habit over and over again, we tend to overlook the conditions that encourage that behavior,” says Sarvenaz Sepehri, Psy.D., a licensed clinical psychologist in Sacramento, California. “Tracking our habits encourages us to do deeper self-reflection,” she explains. “If you’re trying to quit smoking and find that you’re more successful at abstinence on weekends than on weekdays, that’s a useful data point to look into. Why are weekends easier than weekdays? What can you do to recreate similar conditions to help you abstain during the week?’
- Providing visual cues: Building a new habit can be challenging, but it’s easier when you have reminders to keep you on task. Logging your activities to the tracker can remind you that something needs to be done. According to a study in the British Journal of Psychology, people who linked their behavior to a daily routine or specific time saw positive improvements in habit formation.
- Increase motivation: “Habit tracking also helps motivate change—just like star charts once did for us in elementary school—by providing positive reinforcement through control and tracking progress,” says Roach.
Research shows that progress is a powerful driving force. A study in the Harvard Business Review analyzed 238 individuals using a final email survey that consisted of 12,000 entries per day for four months. The results indicate that participants were most motivated and showed positive emotions on days when they made even a little progress at work. Tracking your habits and constantly improving can motivate you to keep working towards your goal.
5 Expert Recommended Habit Tracking App
1. Journy
Journy feels like a game where you fight yourself. The effort is to get a long streak for the slope that you manage by covering your targets. It should be expanded as much as possible. It takes several months to fully implement the next daily practice, and neither does surrender – it takes courage and if you are consistent it will work; whether several businesses require it.
There are various things that you could move with. Journy can be used as a coordinator in building inclinations such as reliable pill use, exercise, or diet adherence. It can similarly be used as an accomplice for people who have memory problems. When it comes to your obscenities, Journy can be an important goal-tracking tool or a wise scratch pad to help you free yourself from persistent vices like nail biting, drinking alcohol, and shockingly, further develop your dating skills.
Journey App Download Links:
2. Habitica
Habitica is a gamified habit improvement app designed in a role-playing game format. “It’s a free habit tracking app that uses a social network and game-based rewards and punishments to increase people’s motivation and productivity,” explains Maria Espinola, Psy.D., psychologist and CEO of the Institute for Health Equity and Innovation.
With Habitica, users can create and customize a character or avatar. When you complete tasks on your to-do lists and habit list in real life, your avatar is rewarded with items and experience that allow you to level up in the game. If you fail to complete your tasks, your character will be destroyed, or lose your health. Most features are free, but additional in-app purchases are available with a subscription.
The habit tracking app, available for iOS and Android, offers a habit list to track good and bad habits at a frequency you set — daily, weekly, or monthly. You can track tasks you want to do multiple times per day and enable reminders for each task. It also offers the opportunity to build goals and work on challenges with friends for more accountability.
3. Stripes
This habit-tracking app is for you if you want to create a habit sequence that consists of repeating the same tasks over a long period of time. “If you’re motivated to see your progress, this is a great app for you,” says Dr. Sepehri.
Roach recommends Streak because “it’s a great habit tracking app for anyone trying to start positive, healthy habits and kick bad ones,” adding that it’s well-organized for “left-brained thinkers.”
Stripes lets you create a to-do list with specific tasks you need to complete each day (up to 24 tasks), choose how often they need to be done, and set reminders. It provides useful statistics to evaluate your progress towards achieving a streak of consecutive days. The user interface is simple and customizable, with 78 colorful themes and 600 task icons to customize the features according to your preferences.
4. StickK
StickK was developed by behavioral economists from the prestigious Yale University. When you sign up, you create a commitment contract with yourself and the app to achieve your goals, you can even bet money on yourself.
For added motivation, you can assign a friend or family member to review your data to make sure you’re on track to reach your goals.
5. Sharing habits
Habitshare is the perfect combination of a social network and an effective habit tracker. Therefore, it allows you to cultivate habits with friends. This makes it stand out as one of the best habit tracking apps out there.
The social options on this platform are quite unusual and unlike others with social networking options, this app has messaging options that allow you to talk and interact with people you know. This way you can motivate your friends or vice versa. This turns your individual goals into a meaningful team effort. Users also have the option to disable the social aspect of this habit tracking app if they want to be more private.
