Life Goals 101
You don’t need a bunch of life hacks to help you change your bad habits. This isn’t about hacking your way to success. Before you can change your nasty habits you need to understand what it is that’s driving them. If you don’t, there’s a strong likelihood that you won’t see any success. So, what does a bad habit look like?
There are three different stages of setting a habit, which goes for good habits or bad ones. Those three stages include cue, routine, and reward.
This can be seen in the ultimate bad habit: smoking. It’s one that so many people are desperate to shed, yet it’s one of the hardest ones to get rid of. First, there’s the cue. It could be stress. When you experience stress it triggers your routine.
Generally, when you start to feel the pressure, you dip outside for a smoke. The reward is the temporary reduction of stress. It’s a powerful habitual loop. It’s hardwired.
That should show you exactly why it is so difficult to purge bad habits from your life. We take a bad habit and we replace it. You don’t break the bad habit, you replace it with a better habit. Some smokers choose to replace their cigarettes with a vape.
You can use nicotine e-juice and slowly taper it off and replace it with no nicotine and then walk away from it altogether. While other people, continue vaping long after they’ve ditched the cigarette habit. They have replaced a nasty habit with a less bad behaviour.
So, you want to quit those nasty habits once and for all? Just as there are three steps to forming a bad habit, there are three steps to breaking those habits.
Three Steps To Success
The first step is that you need to identify the three stages above. What is it that leads your habit? What is your cue, what is the routine, what about the reward?
Look at what time of day your behaviours kick in. Consider the circumstances that drive your bad behaviours.
Who is around and what emotions do you experience? If you experience a stressful day at work, which is the cue, how do you deal with that?
It might be the routine of cracking open a bottle of wine as you sink into the couch. The reward is that you enjoy an evening of television. That will likely help you relax, but it’s a cycle and you’ve wasted time that you could have spent doing something else.
Step two means an exploration of the alternatives. You know the stages that are fueling your bad habit.
Now it’s time to come up with healthier routines to slip in to interrupt the negative habit loop. It could be vaping instead of smoking a cigarette. Or, it may be drinking a cup of herbal tea instead of the normal coffee.
It might be that you plan meals in advance to beat your penchant for ordering pizza. You need to match your reward. If it’s wine after a stressful day, try going for a long walk instead.
The third step is your commitment to real change. You should be prepared to be flexible with your plan and tweak it as times goes on. This is natural as you substitute different routines and habits.
Give each substitute time to work before you give up on it.
Think of it as the experimental stage where you can test drive which routines will be the right fit for you.
It’s challenging to change your behaviours. None of us are immune from experiencing setbacks. If you do slip up, don’t beat yourself up.
Do not allow negative self-talk to take over. The best thing you can do is make your plan as ironclad as possible. It’s all about working with, instead of against, the psychology of a habit.
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Don't think I have any bad habits which could be bad for my health. Minor bad habits - may be, Procrastination perhaps ! Very wisely said :- Procrastination a thief of time !