GOOD HABIT BAD HABIT

 

How to Turn Bad Habits into Good Habits

Note: This is a guest post by John Wesley of about motivation, intelligence, self-improvement, creativity and much more. If you enjoy this post, I recommend you head to his site for more great writing.

Humans are creatures of habit. Think of your daily routine. Every weekday I get up, take a shower, get dressed, eat breakfast, and drive to work. Always in the exact same order. The details might vary, but I usually do the exact same thing every single day. I like it that way.
I like it because it makes me feel in control and because I don’t have to do unnecessary planning. A predictable routine is extremely comforting. The problem is that we get comfortable with bad habits. When a bad habit becomes a part of your daily routine, you lose consciousness of it. You just keep doing it without thinking.
Becoming accustomed to a bad habit makes that habit seem much harder to give up than it really is. You don’t want to change. When you try to give up a bad habit, it leaves a void in your routine that leads to restlessness and urges. The best way to fill this void is with a good habit.
The first step in the process is deciding to give up the bad habit. You can’t decide to give it up because other people say you should. The drive to change must come from within. This drive is created by understanding how the bad habit is harmful.

Decide to Stop Hurting Yourself

Consider the bad habit of going out drinking. It’s absurd when you think about what you’re actually doing. You pay hard earned money to feel hungover and exhausted. Would you pay someone to hit you on the head with a wrench? Getting drunk is basically the same deal.
Once you realize the harm that you do yourself, bad habits become much less appealing. But giving them up still isn’t easy because most bad habits aren’t all bad. Going out drinking satisfies a need for social interaction and excitement. These desires themselves aren’t bad, but we need a better way to satisfy them.

Substitute a Good Habit

Giving up a bad habit shouldn’t be unpleasant, but it is when we feel like we’re denying ourselves. We need to fill the void in our daily routine with something that isn’t as harmful, and we also need to reward ourselves to maintain our motivation.
Suppose you want to stop drinking. It’s tough because you miss the excitement of going out and interacting with other people. Fortunately, there are other ways to fulfill these desires that aren’t as destructive or expensive.
Instead of going out at night, try getting out during the day. Get up early and do something you enjoy. Take a walk around the neighborhood or hang out in a coffee shop for a couple hours. When Friday and Saturday night come around, you won’t feel as restless and the urge to go out drinking will be easier to resist.
Different things work for different people. The key is finding a better way to satisfy the desires you used to satisfy with the bad habit.
If you can replace a bad habit with a positive, enjoyable habit, the change is much more likely to stick. Once you are able to feel satisfied without harming yourself, you’ll wonder how that old bad habit seemed so enjoyable.

These tips can help get you started.

We are creatures of habit, and once we acquire a bad habit it is extremely difficult to break. At the same time, we find it difficult to create good habits, even though we know deep in our hearts they are the right thing to do.
What’s the reason for this? “Humans resist change because all change is difficult,” says Scott Bea, PsyD, a psychologist in Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Behavioral Health.
Without a doubt, substance abuse is among the hardest habits to break, Dr. Bea notes. “Anything that has tension-reducing properties but is classically self-destructive is difficult,” he says. But he adds that other compulsive behaviors — gambling, shopping, Internet use, smoking and overeating, for example — can be just as difficult to break. “They are potently reinforcing,” Dr. Bea says. “Yet their effects wear off quickly, so we are prone to repeat them over and over again.”
People know they want to change — know they need to change — but they resist, even to their own detriment. “We are comfort-craving critters and that leads us to some compulsive bad habits,” Dr. Bea says. So how can one break bad habits?

Prepare for discomfort

First and foremost, you have to prepare yourself to feel uncomfortable — as uncomfortable as that idea might be. “As humans, we resist discomfort,” he says. “We wait for willpower or a feeling to come over us. In reality, it is an unwillingness to accept that something will be uncomfortable that keeps us from where we have to go.”
Whether your goal is weight loss, better nutrition, improved physical fitness or any number of positive behavior changes that can lead to a healthier lifestyle, Dr. Bea suggests these tips to get started in the right direction and maintain your course once begun.

Have a game plan

Include a target date to begin, a target behavior you want to change, how you’re going to change that behavior and a method to track your successes. You want to assess obstacles and pitfalls that could become roadblocks (this could include well-meaning family members and friends).

Avoid talking yourself out of starting

“We have a seductive way of talking to ourselves,” Dr. Bea says. “We can easily tell ourselves, ‘Life is tough right now; I’ll start at another time.’ You have to watch that you don’t seduce yourself away from change.”

Set realistic goals

One of the biggest mistakes people make when they vow to change their habits is doing more than they can handle. For instance, the vow might be to use the treadmill every day. But instead of starting off slow, a person will run for 30 minutes the very first time. Not only can this result in physical injury, but it can lead a person to immediately stop using the treadmill.
“You cannot pick an unreachable goal,” Dr. Bea cautions. “You’ll expect too much out of yourself and when you can’t do it, you immediately shut down.” Rather than going for monumental leaps, he says, an individual should adopt incremental goals. Using the treadmill example, start with 10 minutes and slowly work your way to longer durations.
“You have to adopt the attitude that any effort is superior to no effort,” Dr. Bea points out.

Establish incentives

Incentives are a great way to motivate yourself to do uncomfortable things, Dr. Bea says. You can create symbolic rewards, such as throwing dollars into a cookie jar, for every day you engage in a positive behavior. It’s also a great way to get back into a good habit if you stumble along the way.

“If you reward yourself for immediately getting back into a good habit, you’re likely to continue in the right direction,” he stresses. “Otherwise, you have to somehow muster the hypothetical willpower or gumption to resume, and that can take days, weeks, months or years.”

Maintain your goals

Dr. Bea encourages people to keep an index card with them all the time that lists the good reasons to stay with a behavioral change. “They have a reference point as to why the change is important when their emotions challenge them,” he says.

Create absolute barriers

Adopting good nutritional habits or kicking the smoking habit might be your goal. As long as you don’t have unhealthy foods or cigarettes in the house, you’re fine. But once they’re in the house, temptation is too great. By not purchasing these products, you can create a “counter-incentive,” Dr. Bea says.
And remember that the money you would otherwise spend on these items can be put into a cookie jar. Eventually, you can put the money toward something you really want.

Stay in the here and now

Oftentimes, people who vow to break a bad habit or adopt a good habit cite their family and future occurrences as motivating reasons. They want to be there for their child’s wedding or to enjoy their grandchildren, even if those events are years away. While it is admirable to maintain lofty and far-off goals, Dr. Bea says they cannot be the motivating factors to change your behavior. “It’s today you have to contend with, not six months, two years or 10 years from now,” he maintains. “When you’re suffering in the moment, you need a strategy to deal with that discomfort right then and there.
“That’s the problem with behavior change,” he stresses. “You are going to be faced with very immediate discomforts, very immediate pulls from your history of the things your body loves and craves. You need something very immediate that you can keep track of today. Or those lofty ideals will disappear.”

Try again

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again, as the saying goes. Without question try again, Dr. Bea urges. “Sometimes it takes many trials to get to where you want to go.”

Recognize that it’s a journey

Will you ever arrive at a point where you reach your behavioral change? Absolutely, Dr. Bea insists. But what happens next? At that point, it’s time to adopt a maintenance schedule, or as Dr. Bea explains, go into relapse-prevention mode. “Our humanness can drag us right back from where we came from. We’re creatures of habit, and bad habits still have some power over us.”

Celebrate the payoff

The ultimate success of exchanging bad habits for good will affect every facet of your life, Dr. Bea stresses. “It has physical and emotional benefits, and benefits in terms of longevity and in terms of providing a model for other behavioral changes in the future,” he says. “It affects your self-esteem and your self-regard.”

Success begets success

“What we believe is our reality,” Dr. Bea says. “Self-belief — belief in one’s own effectiveness and ability to chart one’s course — is a huge benefit. That puts wind in our sails for just about every endeavor we encounter.”