Money Listens

If you’re like most people, you don’t like Mondays. But Monday is the best day for starting a new habit. Especially the first Monday of a month. There’s a branch of psychology that studies how we problem solve and change our behavior. You can use Mondays to change your old behavior and kick-start a new habit.

Isn’t that a coincidence, today is the first Monday in May. Decide to start a new habit. Pick one that will save you some money. What about cooking dinner at home in May? Not only will it save you money, but it probably will be healthier for you.

To break your old habit of eating out you have to overcome the dreaded path of least resistance (POLR). The POLR is to do what you’ve always done. Studies show that when the POLR is taken away, we become more creative in solving problems.

Imagine it’s dinner time. You’re looking in the fridge and muttering “there’s no food in here, only ingredients.” The POLR is to jump in the car and head out to dinner. Or call Pizza Pronto. But you can’t do this, because you’ve decided to cook at home. You may think “there’s nothing here to eat,” but forced to come up with dinner, you pull out some items, and create something to eat. You may think you can’t, but psychology shows that you can and will be creative and figure out how to get by on what you have. Decide not to take the POLR.

This entry (Permalink) was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 5:00 am and is filed under Goals and Dreams, Spending Less and Less. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site.