Daily Habit Hacks. Daily Steps To Break Habits & Create Good Ones
How to Develop Good Habits and Make Them Stick
We all have a desire to form good habits that will make our lives better. Whether it's eating healthy, exercising more, or getting more organized, form good habits can take some work. You might find that when you try to develop good habits, you’re able to stick with them for a while before losing your motivation and quitting. This can become incredibly frustrating if it happens often. Here’s how you can develop good habits and make them stick.
Start Small
A majority of people are looking to create significant changes in their life as quickly as they can. The problem with this approach to forming good habits is that it requires a ton of willpower. Research has shown that your willpower works a lot like a muscle. If you use it a lot, it will tend to get tired and will increase your chances of quitting. The solution is to start small and focus on establishing the new habit first. You never want to increase your effort before the habit has become a natural part of what you do every day.
Get Hooked
When you've invested a lot of effort into completing a new project, it can be challenging to let the project go. You can use this tendency to your advantage. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld used what he called “don’t break the chain” to become a better comic. He committed to writing a new joke every day, and when he completed his writing for the day, he would mark the day on the calendar with a big red "X." After a couple of days, he had a chain he didn't want to break. This strategy creates a visual reminder of the effort you’ve invested in forming a new habit.
Celebrate Small Wins
Most people are better at beating themselves up for poor performance than they are about rewarding themselves for a good one. When it comes to forming new habits, celebrating your progress is enormous for your motivation. Every time you make progress toward your new habit, no matter how small, make sure that you reward yourself for increasing your feelings of achievement and pride.
Surround Yourself with Support
The circle of people in our lives has a surprisingly significant impact on our behavior. One way to dramatically increase your chances of success in forming new habits is to make sure you have the right people in your corner.
Forming new habits takes time and practices, but with these four tips, you can be well on your way to creating a life of happiness.
We all have some good habits, as well as some bad ones. The only problem is too many of us don't know how to eliminate the bad habits from our lives.
Even more, people confess to wanting to stop their bad habits but struggle when it comes to removing them for good.
Before you can successfully destroy your bad habits, you have to know exactly what a habit is.
A habit is a routine of behavior that is repeated continually, and that occurs in the subconscious mind, which is why so many people aren't fully aware of their bad habits.
The key to overcoming your bad habits is first to develop some insight into the origin of the habit. Ultimately your life is a sum of your habits.
The process of building a habit can be divided into four categories:
· The cue
· The craving
· The response
· The reward
Breaking your habits down into these fundamental categories can help you understand what a habit is, how it works, and how you can break it. This is known as the habit loop. Primarily, a cue is developed, which, when activated triggers a craving.
The craving then motivates a response, which provides your brain with a reward, which satisfies the desire, and ultimately becomes associated with the cue. Together, these four things end up forming a neurological feedback loop that eventually allows you to develop automatic habits.
Fortunately, there are many ways that you can destroy your bad habits and keep them away for good. Which one works best will depend entirely on your individual circumstances and specific inclinations.
If you are looking to eliminate your bad habits, here are five simple ways to destroy them for good.
Quit Cold Turkey
One way that you can eliminate bad habits is by not indulging in them, not even for one day, starting now. Unfortunately, this is much easier said than done.
Unfortunately, it can be incredibly challenging to get rid of a bad habit, because it is deeply ingrained in your brain. When the bad habit’s trigger repeats, it can quickly reignite the old behavior. This is the greatest weakness in this particular method.
Often, when an old pattern or behavior recurs, when you slip back into your old bad habit just once, you tend to make a huge fuss over it, and you feel like you wasted all of your time being abstinent.
You end up becoming crushed by self-disappointment that when you slip just once and return to your old habit, you completely slip back into your old ways.
However, there is a power to such an approach. If you are able to quit cold turkey and persevere in your resolve, you can prove to yourself that you are entirely capable of making changes.
Change Your Habit Loop
Recent studies discovered that habits are stored in the brain in a different way than more standard memories. Typically, when it comes to your habits, your emotion triggers a behavior that ends when the emotional urge has been satisfied. There are twofold repercussions to these findings.
First, if your habits are hard-coded in your mind, it means they are impossible to remove. This means that once those habits have been formed, they will stay with you for the rest of your life, which is why drug addicts and alcoholics relapse into their addictions, sometimes after decades of sobriety.
Second, there isn’t any such thing as getting rid of your old habits. Instead, you have to overwrite the bad habit with a new routine. The most efficient method for achieving this is by reprogramming the behavior. However, you have to make the new habit stronger than the old habit if you want it to stick.
Fortunately, by changing your habit loop, you can more easily solidify the new behavior, which will make it much more difficult for you to return to the old habit.
Use Small Steps
Using small steps to overcome a bad habit is a combination of quitting cold turkey and changing your habit loop as discussed above. While you don’t agree with your bad habit, you also freely admit that you aren’t able to quit your habit cold turkey.
This makes it necessary to analyze your behaviors and identify your triggers. When you can accomplish these two tasks, you can gradually limit your bad habit.
For example, if you are trying to break the habit of eating poorly, you can start small by indulging in fewer sweets.
With each passing week, you need to work on reaching another milestone in eliminating your bad habit from your life. After enough time has passed, and you've continually worked toward making small changes in your habit, you will finally arrive at a point when you can completely stop engaging in your bad behavior automatically.
Theoretically, with this method, you should be less prone to feeling discouraged when you slip. You have to assume some amount of failure with this method but are better equipped to keep your motivation. This method is much more convenient for those who are able to quantify their bad habits.
Track Your Progress to Reinforce Your Determination
While this isn't necessarily a method for breaking a bad habit per se, it is beneficial in every instance of getting rid of a bad habit. In the case of the above method of taking small steps toward getting rid of your bad habit, the approach is relatively apparent. If you are about to restrict yourself by, say a few cigarettes, then you need to track the number, right?
When you change your habit loop, it is also a great idea to start tracking what is and what isn’t working.
At the bare minimum, tracking your progress comes down to checking whether or not you engaged in your bad habit that day.
You can also use the tracking method when using the cold turkey method of eliminating bad habits. When you quit your bad habit, you should be counting the days without the behavior or habit and try to build a streak that motivates you to keep going.
When you find yourself clean for a single day, and you haven't been in years, it can be incredibly blissful. The second day that you add to the chain feels like an event that is worthy of a celebration. Then comes the joy at going a week, later a month, then the first year.
These kinds of milestones can provide you with a sense of accomplishment, despite the fact that you aren't really doing anything other than abstaining from engaging in a habit, which is the whole point of this particular method.
What's more, tracking your progress works in the same way as building your good habits. It focuses your attention on the essential things and provides you with the motivation to keep moving forward. It can also provide you with valuable data points, that can help you to identify your pitfalls and critical points.
Focus on Your Good Habits
This method will ultimately kill your bad habits by starving them. Getting rid of bad habits focuses your attention on the negative aspects of your life. It can end up feeling incredibly restrictive rather than liberating.
When you are focused on eliminating bad habits, you watch yourself all the time and end up denying yourself the pleasures that you’re used to having in your life. While you know that in the long run, it is better to avoid engaging in your bad habits, but those bad behaviors are a part of who you are, whether you like it or not.
They were the mechanisms that you used to relieve stress and help you cope with anxiety and low self-esteem. Without them, your life might seem to be less bearable.
So, instead of focusing on your bad behaviors and what you can’t do, it is much better for you to focus on new activities that contribute to your life in a more positive way.
To break your bad habits, funnel all of your energy into habits that will improve your experience rather than avoiding what is wrong with it.
While your bad habits will continue to lurk in the depths of your brain, they only time they will resurface is if you lower your guard.
Conclusion
When it comes to eliminating bad habits from your life, it is essential to remember that you are about to embark on a long and challenging journey. You will continually be tempted to return back to your old ways and risk succumbing to your old habits.
While these methods will help you to break your bad habits, it is vital that you remember that the temptation to fall back into your old ways will always be there.
Don’t continue to let your bad habits dictate your life. Take the first positive steps toward changing your bad habits today and start living a happier and healthier life now.
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Daily Steps To Break Bad Habits & Create Good Ones
