How does this process work?
Through our thinking and repetitive activities, we reprogram our subconscious mind to adopt that kind of behavior and execute it at the littlest effort invested possible. If we take Psycho-Cybernetics as a reference, it says that about three week to a month are required for this new attribute to domesticate itself in your mind.

How good habits make the difference?
As we people have realised that time can’t be managed and that we should optimize our energy investments to our activities, it soon becomes clear, how profitable can be the delegation of our chores and repetitive tasks as habits to our subconscious mind, where they will be regularly executed with little or no conscious effort needed. This could be described as some kind of a mind hack to our preferred behaviour (always heading along the path of the least resistance), where all the conscious effort is excluded from the process. For an example if we would like to get up at 6am every day and take some kind of physical practice, our mind will very likely come up with various arguments for not getting up and oversleep our planned activity. This behaviour may seem beneficial in short run by getting enough sleep, but can’t compare to long term benefits of improved physical condition by regular daily exercise. Even furthermore, the more I study success stories and success principles, the more evident it is how habits shape the character and are many times the crucial difference between a man of standards and the one of great success.

And how the bad ones are lowering the life’s quality…
Smoking, drinking to much coffee, being late, campaign learning, spending all of our income every month, overeating, lack of physical exercise, watching TV long into the night, spending half a day unproductively on facebook, becoming a news junkie, work-a-holism, can’t spend a weekend without being drunk, chronically getting up late in the morning… You don’t have to guess twice, how productive can you be with such practices…

How to raise the good ones?
The most effective technique that has yet come into my way are probably 30-day trials. That is about enough time for your subconsciousness to get programmed to a desired way and still small enough time span that everyone should be able to keep his focus along. Just choose a habit you want and repeat it strictly every day for 30 days. At first it can be very hard, but over time it gets much easier… You just need to have enough will and determination to keep up and defeat the emerging barriers. More about this subject can be read here.

And why I am writing all of this?
Because one could never exaggerate the importance of the role habits play in someones life. They determine someones quality of life, the wealth someone is going to accumulate, quality of his relationships, development of various person’s faculties, etc. They take part in almost any area of life imaginable. In most cases, you would say, that it’s his character, he can’t do anything about that… But even our characters are made somehow. We have some kind of predispositions inborn, but attitude towards life, our philosophies, they are mostly in-learned. So if you have any serious interest in development of your potentials, you should certainly give them some more attention and gain their better understanding.

If you are interested in further studies of this subject, you should take a look at the following books:
Stephen R. Covey: Seven habits of highly effective people
Maxwell Maltz: Psycho-Cybernetics

But as bad habits can be destructive, good ones can be beneficial to our activities. I still believe that much more than time, energy is the main constraint to all our goals, so it is the main subject that needs to be optimized, while we strive to higher performance and better life quality. This can be done through various things, like changing our diet, working out, getting enough sleep, lowering impact of different negative emotions, and many others, together with our positive habits. Because when you make a habit out of some repetitive task, the energy demand for its completion will fall drastically. As an example you can go back in your memory and remember how much more effort you needed to invest in your driving when you were just learning, towards today. Especially if you drive to work every day, pay attention on how much you remember about the surroundings you were driving through when you get to work or get home. Sadly, but most of us would have no idea about the trip details when asked. So much about safe driving.

So bad habits as well as good ones can be cultivated. Good ones usually a bit harder, but it’s well worth it. For example, I’ve set myself a habit of waking up early, do some physical exercise to wake myself up and be ready for that day’s challenges, and also a habit of spending an hour daily on learning things I think will be most beneficial for my near future. And as you can guess, waking up at 6 o’clock when you have no time constraints (like job etc.) can be pain in the ass, go running or doing some other physical exercise even bigger as also egoistically taking an hour daily for your personal “matters” which aren’t even a priority at the moment. Especially when we so hardly find time for anything other than our job, college or family. But think of the benefits of physically better prepared and more immune body or having a 365 hours long learning course every year and all the knowledge you would gather… Probably wouldn’t hurt you, would it? But it’s all up to you…