36 steps How to Break Your Bad Habits

 Breaking Your Bad Habits

In this article you will learn the following

-How bad habits gets formed

-Why it is difficult to get rid of your bad habit

-What Reinforces your bad habits

-36 Tips How to get rid of your bad habits

Very few people are consciously aware of their self-destructive habits of overthinking, overanalyzing and catastrophizing along with how sometime their behavior becomes toxic for their loved ones.

But -Most of the people know their bad habits- which is responsible for majority of the problems, challenges, stress and negative consequences - in their life.

Some of the bad habits may ruins your most important relationships and might be the biggest obstacle to your growth and success.

Logically if you know what is bad for you - you should be able to change easily - but if you are like me - you would find it very-very difficult to stop or change your bad habits.

Most of you would have experienced that leaving any addictions, your toxic thinking-patterns and negative-behaviors - is not only highly challenging but for few turns out impossible to change.

In real life situations - breaking bad habits takes time and effort along with disciplined perseverance - you would fail multiple times before you are able to get rid of it.

Why it is So Hard to Change - why can't you just stop your bad habits taking control over your destiny.

My own experiences is that Bad habits are very easy to form and most difficult to get rid of.

On the other hand forming good habits are very-very difficult to acquire - and replacing any bad habit with a good one is even more challenging.

We acquire most of our bad habits because of either extreme Stress or Boredom because of not having any inspiring goals.

In many cases there are deeper emotional-mental-psychological issues which triggers your bad habits.

Your bad habits gets reinforced due to some of your perceptions, beliefs or any deep-rooted fear as well as emotional-insecurities - which makes it harder and harder for you to leave them.

If you can identify how you developed these self-sabotaging, self-defeating and self-harming habits and routines - you would be able to create sustainable meaningful changes in your lifestyles by adopting healthy and positive behaviors by replacing the negative habits.

Genesis of many negative habits have to do with instant - fun, thrill, adventure and high levels of excitements - which we get when we do something inherently negative.

Few of the deadly habits are - smoking, substance-abuse, Spending Too Much Money, Buying recklessly, alcohol, drugs, gambling and excessive use of social-media and mobile etc.

Pleasure and fast-gratification based habits are the hardest to break - as you get thrill and high every time you indulge in that behavior.

People keep getting trapped deeper and deeper - when they indulge in bad unhealthy habits looking for same levels of pleasure - which actually gradually becomes less and less thrilling.

People who get addicted to drugs and alcohol - their craving dictates their actions and in most cases ruins not only their relationships with their near and dear ones but also play havoc financially, professionally, physically, psychological and socially in the lives of their most loved ones.

Some of the people when they realize and decide to get rid of their bad habits use their will-power excessively - as a result it gets depleted and your self-control becomes weaker and weaker - making them lose the requisite mental-emotional-physical resolve to take actions and as a result there-of their bad habits actually becomes more powerful.

To become more powerful than your temptations, your cravings and your urges which seeks instant gratification you need to develop and nurture - strong emotional powerhouse - by practicing few small-small yet profound action-steps [read my how to do it yourself blogs on this and on self-control].

There is no single formula - which can give you the solutions in one go - and which will work for everyone.

You need to explore, experiment and then choose what works for you - many of the tips given in this article as well in my other relevant blogs will work for you wonderfully as it is.

36 Tips How to get rid of your bad habits

• 1.The very 1st and most important step - is knowing what you need to change and WHY - by becoming aware of your unhealthy habits and in how many ways they are harming you PLUS what benefits if you get rid of these
• 2. Focus on WHY you want to change - identify all your WHYs - do it for both negative consequences of not changing as well as the positive benefits of eliminating your bad habits - in details
• 3.7 techniques to manage your Triggers
• I.Then you need to identify what triggers your bad habits - makes you go for that unhealthy habit
• II.Then you have to identify which specific situation or person - presses the trigger most
• III.Identify which person and situation you can avoid - without any significant loss
• IV.Identify what rewards - makes you stick with this bad habit - then find something to substitute the reward for doing healthy behaviors
• V.Identify which person or situation you can't avoid and must deal with by yourself - then you need to learn and practice the techniques given in my blogs - dealing with difficult people, dealing toxic bosses, dealing with mean people etc.
• VI.Create your own plans of action based on the tips that you find doable for you from my blogs and elsewhere
• VII.Identify what you need to learn and equip yourself with - in order to manage situations and people more effectively
• 4.Use the NLP visualization techniques to - visualize seeing yourself in the most tempting situations that triggers bad behaviors in you - then using your mental-power see yourself refusing the temptation - to build your mental-resilience - PRACTICE THIS - many-many times
• 5.Explore and identify what small-small positive behavior you can use - when you feel the urge to go for negative behavior
• 6.If you are one of the few lucky ones - who are able to easily replace their unhealthy routines with new healthy ones - like exercising
• 7.Daily Exercises done in a disciplined manner helps you increase your self-control tremendously
• 8.Find alternative behaviors that can counteract your unhealthy urges
• 9.Find small-small steps of a newly identified behaviors and start using it more and more often and in multiple scenarios - to slowly improve your ability to maintain these behavioral changes
• 10.Solicit the help of your friends, co-workers and family - for some addiction or disorder which is ruing your life and making you miserable
• 11.Seek help from medically qualified experts - in case you are unable to deal with yourself
• 12.Create buddy to break your bad-habits -Join forces with somebody - for motivation and sustaining and encouraging each other
• 13.Surround yourself with people who live the way you want to live
• 14.Understand that you need to focus on to become yourself - the real authentic you
• 15.Do not try to ignore or suppress your self-criticizing inner talk - instead listen to that and tell that yes this is true BUT you are going to break it - I have failed in this BUT I am going do this and this and this [be very-very specific] to eliminate this and get a better result
• 16.Create solutions for failures in your Plans - all of us would make mistake, screw-up, go off-track or fail - this is part of growth and success process
• 17. Initially use reminders - so that you do not forget to take an important action - Using stickers, sticky notes, or other visual reminders
• 18. Train yourself to be mentally flexible - let go of the all OR nothing mindset
• 19 Start small till slowly you build the habit and momentum - nothing of significance can be done fast and soon
• 20. Change your environment and surroundings - if need be then on even permanent basis - to make it more conducive and supporting of your change-goals
• 21. Focus on Self-care - throughout your life
• 22.Eat well, sleep adequate, relax and have fun
• 23.Do things that improve your mood -Motivate yourself with creating healthy and motivating rewards for reaching a milestones
• 24.Have patience - Give it time -Accept that success isn't a straight line
• 25.Monitor your actions and emotions to be on the lookout for triggering stimuli to Know your cues
• 26.Capitalize on major life changes to break an unhealthy habit
• 27.Identify situation in the past where you successfully got rid of a bad behavior and ALSO those where you had relapsed into old habits- it is important to examine to determine what you can do to avoid relapse AND also how to successfully replace a bad habit with a healthy one
• 28.Realize the Reward of Your Bad Habit - Replace the reward with curiosity to creating sustainable, positive habit change is to find a new reward that is more rewarding than the existing behavior -Use a Mix of Small and Large Rewards
• 29.Impose a Punishment or Remove a Reward for Your Bad Habit
• 30.Create barriers to your bad habits - try If you can create obstacles that make the bad habit more difficult or unpleasant to engage AND makes any other course of action more preferable