Have you got any bad habits that you’d like to get rid of? Most people have at least one habit they’d like to see gone from their lives, and many people have quite a few! Bad habits can be anything you repeatedly do that isn’t good for you or those around you. Smoking tobacco is an obvious example, but there are many other less harmful habits that people find very difficult to quit. If you wish you could stop some annoying habit or change your behavior, how do you get started?
Creating new habits
One of the most effective ways of quitting a bad habit is to replace it with a new activity. When you try to stop repeating a customary action, it leaves a hole in your routine or makes you feel like you’ve lost a form of emotional support. All you can think about is whatever it is you’re trying to avoid doing, so if you can plug the gap with a new activity, you won’t be so focused on missing the original one.
Creating the right habits
When you’re considering what to replace your bad habit with, don’t just exchange one bad habit for another. For instance, if you try and give up smoking by eating a candy bar whenever you have a craving for a cigarette, you may end up swapping the tobacco for being overweight and having diabetes. The replacement activity needs to be something that you’ll enjoy enough so that it stops you falling into your old ways, but that doesn’t get you stuck with a new bad habit.
Getting help with your bad habits
Some bad habits are irritating more than harmful, and in many cases changing a bad habit is a goal you can achieve on your own. However, at times you may need some assistance with quitting those bad habits. Getting help could be as simple as buying a product to stop you biting your nails, or it could be that you need to consider some form of psychological therapy to make the difference.
Some of the habits people get into are unlikely to improve without some intervention. For instance, people refer to drug users as having a habit, but their affliction is one of the most severe kinds of habits that requires expert treatment to recover from.
Often your need for help won’t be related to the apparent seriousness of the problem, so, for example, some people manage to stop smoking without any nicotine replacement products or help from health professionals, while others struggle even with every kind of assistance available. Your need to crack your knuckles every few minutes might not sound like a significant issue to someone else, but if it’s driving you to distraction and you can’t stop, you’d be better off asking for help than trying to struggle on.
If you want to change, you need to commit to the process and find the replacement or diversionary tactic that eases you safely away from your old behavior, so you can finally say goodbye to your bad habits.
