3 Steps for Efficiently Breaking Bad Habits

Dr. Purushothaman
January 10, 2014

 

What are bad habits?
Habits we do not need, right?
Well, that's only partially true, which will be the primary reason why we have such trouble breaking undesired habits.
It does not matter if it is eating inadequately, biting our nails or skipping the gym, this short article will show a 3 step process to you to over come your undesirable habits.
Before I go into the 3 steps, let's look at the traditional method for breaking a bad habit. Let's say you desired to quit drinking coffee after 4pm simply because you understand that the caffeine will make it hard for you to get to bed during the night. So what do many people do?
They give themselves a pep talk. 'From this day forward, you can forget espresso after 4pm because I do not wish to have coffee after 4pm.' What exactly happens? The first couple of days are easy but usually by the end of the week, the need to drink coffee after 4pm becomes stronger and stronger. Some people could even last until week two but most people just surrender to their indulgences and then regret perhaps not having the ability to keep their resolve.
Seems like familiar, you then are in luck because this article will review a 3 step approach that will sustainably break your improper habits. Each of these 3 steps involves asking a vital question regarding bad habit.
Ready?
What does it do for you?
In the beginning we explained undesirable habits as anything we don't want but that is certainly not true. Exactly why your bad habit is hard to break is because it is doing anything positive for you. It's very important to find what that is and to clearly establish it. For example, smoking is really a bad habit that you would like to break but it helps you to relax and that is why you carry on and smoke.
What else can you do to obtain the same benefit?
When you establish the benefit that you get from your bad habit, the way to break it is to seek out different ways to get the same benefit that your bad habit offers you. Therefore if we keep using the smoking case, the target is to find other ways to relax besides smoking. Choices may be to meditate or to exercise.
That is the most effective choice I can commit to?
The last thing you would like to do is to deal one bad habit for another. Ensure that the choice that you choose does not have any negative side effects. If your option to smoking would be to take valium, you might want to select something else. The other part of this question is to ensure that the choice is something you can invest in. If you know that you don't like meditating and can not invest in it, then by all means pick something else that can give you the same benefit.
So there's the 3 stage process:
- Discover the advantage of the bad habit
- Find solutions to give you the same benefit
- Choose the best alternative you can agree to

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