So why do numerous people have bad habits?
When you go to change a habit, you’re likely to fail. You might even get frustrated and give up.
When you break bad habits, you also learn the hard way. You get it wrong. You set up a bad habit. You see how good it feels to break it. You get so excited to break that bad habit that you can’t stop.
Bad habits stick around for many reasons. Some people just don’t want to do the work. It feels like they’re being lazy.
You might try to break bad habits without enough intensity and break a good habit in the process. This combination can give you bad habits all over again.
But the truth is, your body can break bad habits too. You just need the right tools.
How to Break Bad Habits
Breaking a bad habit requires a very specific action, which you might not feel comfortable doing right away. You need to take it slow and only do a little each day.
11 Ways to Break Bad Habits
1. Keep track
The first step in breaking a habit is increasing your awareness. To increase awareness, you need to keep track.
Make a mental note of how you feel, and make that a habit in the days that follow. That’s the first step. And it might not be that bad.
Write down how you feel when you break a bad habit. You might feel disappointed. You might feel an urge to binge. Or you might just feel more relaxed and motivated.
Keep track of how you feel. And then remember this feeling each time you see or try a bad habit.
If you don’t remember how you felt the first time you tried a bad habit, you’re more likely to break it. Because your body’s used to breaking bad habits. And the first time it does it, it makes it really serious.
Keep track of how you feel each time you break a bad habit. This will help you reset your subconscious mind to stop bad habits.
I’m learning this method. It’s helping me break bad habits quickly. I get on the wrong side of stress and reward myself with a bad habit I didn’t want in the first place.
2. Identify the trigger.
To stop the habit, identify the trigger. The trigger is the thing that makes you feel tempted to break the habit.
With the trigger, find something to replace the habit with.
The trigger can be the monetary gain of a bad habit. But this is often only a really small part of the matter . That’s not the whole problem.
The trigger will only make you break the bad habit more often, not break it every time you see it.
So find something that motivates you to break a bad habit. Then replace the habit with something that motivates you to break it every day.
3. Trick yourself into changing habits.
The next step is to trick your subconscious mind. I call these “healthy bad habits.”
This is a healthy habit that’s helpful. If you do a healthy habit, it’s challenging. But it’s not horrible. It can be easier than breaking bad habits.
If you break a habit, it’s usually awful. It feels bad at the moment. But it feels worse in the long term.
This means that if you break a bad habit, it might feel terrible for a couple of days, but in the end, you’ll break it because it’s healthy and good for you. It’s not because you want to do it.
This is the definition of a bad habit. You want to break a bad habit. But you don’t. You break it for the wrong reasons.
Don’t break a healthy habit for the wrong reasons. You want to change your bad habits.
Your habits should feel good at the moment. But you want to break them in the long-term because they’re bad.
If you break a bad habit, it feels horrible at the moment. But in the long-term, it feels horrible.
4.Leave yourself reminders.
Using stickers, sticky notes, or other visual reminders wherever the habit behavior happens can assist you rethink the action when something triggers you.
And if you have problems with motivation, perhaps visual reminders will help you have the motivation you need to break a bad habit.
The reminder is how you trick your mind into changing the habit.
Visual reminders work in two ways.
First, it can show you that something bad is happening when you want to break the bad habit. When your habit is healthy, it’s easy to forget about it. That’s the healthy habit trick.
But the healthy habit trick is a problem with bad habits. You can remember you're bad habits because you remember bad things. It’s much more difficult to remember healthy habits.
It only works in very small things. So make it easy to remember. Otherwise, it might become a pain, and you won’t do it.
Second, visual reminders can force you to make changes when your motivation is low. If you’re tempted to break a bad habit, the visual reminder is a reminder of the desire to break it.
5.Make unrelated good decisions.
“Confidence” is that the ability to stay promises to yourself. Mind-blow, right? But it’s not the easy answer.
In our goal-setting books, we talk about successful habits, which we define as related to good decisions. Making good decisions is the easiest thing to do.
You’re not trying to decide what to do every day. You’re trying to decide what to do when you want to make a change.
Every successful change is related to a related good decision.
That’s why you need to break your bad habits and make your unrelated good habits.
When you make a habit-related good decision, you’re making a decision unrelated to your bad habit. You’re forcing yourself to make an unrelated good decision, and that’s how you break bad habits.
These are good decisions. They’re unrelated to your bad habit.
6. Use a journal to track your decisions.
We’re in the habit process to break bad habits. But it’s not the sole thing we'd like to try to do.
You have to do other things, like breaking your bad habits. But your journal can also help you track other things, too.
7.Change your environment.
Your surroundings can sometimes have an enormous impact on your habits.
For example, if you always eat with the TV on and play video games when you want to break a bad habit, it can be hard. And it won’t work.
Let’s look at an example: breaking a bad habit.
Sometimes you have a bad habit because it feels like a bad habit. When you’re trying to break a bad habit, a bad environment is a bad thing.
But sometimes you can change your environment to become more like a healthy habit. That’s how you break your bad habits and make unrelated good decisions.
For example, when you’re trying to break a bad habit, you might need to change your environment. If you have an unhealthy habit, like smoking, you might find it helpful to change the environment around your habits.
8.Start fresh regularly.
When you skip a workout, binge bad foods, stay awake too late, or scroll through Instagram too long, it doesn’t cause you to bad; it causes you to human. Being human means having habits. It means having bad habits.
But sometimes you might want to start fresh. You want to start fresh with a new lifestyle. You want to break a bad habit and make unrelated good decisions.
If you’re trying to break a bad habit, take it one step at a time.
That’s one way to break bad habits.
Start fresh at the beginning of every day, and do a new set of unrelated good decisions.
9.Know that you don’t have to do it alone
You might have success breaking some habits, like buying lunch a day or skipping the gym, on your own, with a touch of effort and dedication.
But if you would like to deal with deeper habits, like emotional eating, compulsions, alcohol misuse, or addiction, the support of a trained psychological state professional can make a world of difference.
Working through these issues alone is often tough, and a therapist or counselor offers guidance and support.
A mental health professional can help you:
identify changes you want to make
explore anything blocking you from change
identify your motivations for change
get perspective on your progress
learn how to counter and deal with negative self-talk
“The accountability of meeting with someone regularly can also provide a structure that supports the changes you’ve made,” Myers concluded.
It might not appear to be it at the instant, but over time, your new habits will become established in your lifestyle. Soon enough, they'll even feel as natural as your old habits.