HOW TO BREAK BAD HABITS AND CREATE GREAT ONES.

Have you ever thought how damaging your habits could be? Do you even know what your habits are? Are they so ingrained, so routine that you don’t even realise you are doing them? It is no wonder then that you don’t know how they could be affecting you and your life.

We all build habits, but these habits can have a significant impact on you, on your self worth, on your confidence, on whether or not you achieve your goals. On how positive you are, on how resilient you are, whether you are glass half empty or half full. 

You can term habits as being ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ or you could term them as ‘motivating’ vs ‘limiting’ or ‘progressive’ vs ‘repressive’. Whichever term you give to them, the long and short of it is that some habits can stop you and some can help you to achieve whatever you want.

According to researchers at Duke University, habits account for about 40 percent of our behaviours on any given day. This is significant, particularly when you consider that most of our habits are subconscious and you don’t even know that you are doing them. Now imagine if that entire 40% were ‘bad’, ‘limiting’, ‘repressive’ habits, consider how they may be affecting you, how could they be holding you back? (Pause on that for a second…!) Even if you change just 10% of them, this could have a significant effect on your life. If you were able to recognise those ‘bad’ habits and change them into ‘good’ habits what difference would that have on you, on how you feel, on your confidence to go after what you really want? …Quite a big thought isn’t it!

So, the how? What do you need to do move forward? Addressing ‘bad’ habits is fundamental to make change in order to progress. But how do we address them. Be honest with yourself, where is there negativity in your life and what are the actions you do which lead to that feeling. It could be anything from sabotaging your diet by raiding the cupboard late at night, or snoozing your alarm too much every morning, making you late and stressed, or scrolling through your phone so much you don’t have time to read that book you keep saying you are going to read. Be honest. 

Habits are nothing more than associations. Associating actions to a location, a problem, a day, a context. Think how you feel when it gets to Friday and you ‘need’ a drink, a habit associated with that day. Imagine if you were trying to give up drinking for a month or so, when that Friday night comes round, that’s most likely when you are going to sabotage your progress, all because of the association. Really the day doesn’t matter, Friday is just another day. 

Start to recognise what those associations are. To break the habits you need to be honest with yourself, let go of excuses, let go of emotion and focus on moving forward, focus on progression, focus on developing a new goal. Challenge that association by building a new context around it and change the routine. If you have a bad habit of going to bed and then staring at your phone for hours, make a change by leaving your phone in another room. If you raid the cupboards in the evenings, create a new habit by changing up the situation; go for a walk after dinner, take a bath, change your routine so that it is not associated with going to the cupboard. Think of it as a 3 step process: Challenge, Change, Create.

When you build new habits, start small, it’s not all or nothing. Build slowly, if you want to start exercising, go 2 or 3 times a week rather than committing to every day! If you want to do more baking, commit to baking once a week or even every fortnight. At the beginning, focus on small steps which you can build on later down the line. And remember you are human, things happen, if one day things don’t go as planned that doesn’t mean that they have failed, reset and move onto the next day. Sustained efforts is really where the magic happens.