Your life is disrupted by bad habits, which also keep you from reaching your goals. You consume a lot of time and energy on bad habits, affecting your emotional and physical well-being.
Why, then, do you continually indulge in them? And perhaps most importantly, what can you do about it?
Two factors are often the root cause of these bad habits; stress and boredom.
Often, bad habits are just a person’s way of coping with stress and boredom. A simple way to deal with stress and boredom is to do anything from biting one’s nails, going on expensive shopping sprees, and drinking every weekend to spending hours online.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. You may change your bad habit by teaching yourself new, constructive methods to deal with stress and boredom.
The following steps will guide you in successfully overcoming that bad habit:
1. Identify triggers:
The first step in overcoming repetitive bad habits is to recognize the triggers that lead to them.
Track your habit for a few days to determine whether it exhibits any trends.
Let’s say you want to stop staying up past midnight. After a few days of tracking your behavior, you realize you tend to stay up later if you start watching TV or chatting with friends after dinner. But you go to bed earlier if you read or take a walk.
Consider a scenario where you wish to cut back on staying up late. Suppose you start watching TV or talking to friends after dinner. In that case, you will only consciously realize this after a few days of tracking your activity compared to reading or taking a walk after dinner, which helps you fall asleep faster.
Having resolved to quit watching TV and switch off my phone by 10 o’clock – it becomes more difficult to maintain the habit of staying up late when the trigger, such as watching TV or talking to friends, is removed.
2. Be Mindful of your Daily Activity:
Your ability to become aware of your thoughts, feelings, and actions can be improved through mindfulness. This technique merely notices urges connected to your habit without judging or responding to them.
It might be simpler to think of different possibilities when you become more conscious of these repetitive behaviors and the triggers that cause those bad habits, such as avoiding reminder cues or resisting cravings.
3. Choose a Substitute for the Bad Habit:
Instead of just trying to stop the bad habit, you could find it easier to break the habit if you replace it with a new behavior.
They want to follow the new habit that emerges as they continue to practice the new behavior. The motivation to maintain the new conduct may eventually win over the urge to continue the old behavior as you reap the benefits of the new activity.
4. Plan for Failure:
Some behaviors might be simpler to break than others, but breaking a habit can be difficult.
Change is difficult. You won’t give up those behaviors overnight because they take time to develop.
When setbacks happen, please make an effort to grow out of them. Consider altering your strategy to help you stay more on track. Be honest with yourself about what caused the setback.
5. Picture Yourself succeeding:
You don’t have to thoroughly engage in physical activity to break bad habits. You can also mentally rehearse new replacement habits.
When you mentally practice an alternative answer, it will become more natural when encountering real-life circumstances.
6. Have a Better Reason for Breaking that Bad Habit:
Even if you switch a bad habit for a better one, the original vice occasionally has a stronger biological “reward” than the replacement.
We know in our heads that giving up smoking is good for our health. However, the motivation for changing a habit is often unique and individual; for example, permanently quitting smoking may allow you to spend more time with your family. This provides a stronger dose of motivation to break that bad habit easily.
Breaking bad habits takes time and effort, but mostly it takes perseverance. Most people who break bad habits try and fail multiple times before they make it work. You might not have success immediately, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have it.
It takes time and effort to break bad habits, but persistence is the key. Most people who eventually succeed in quitting unhealthy habits make several failed attempts before they finally succeed.
Your new routines will gradually become ingrained in your daily routine. They might eventually feel just as natural to you as your previous behaviors.
