How do you go about stopping a habit you do not like in yourself?
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How do you go about stopping a habit you do not like in yourself?
Accept that you’re having bad habits. No one is perfect and there is nothing shameful about having bad habits, as long as you want to improve yourself. You have to be extremely clear that acceptance isn’t inaction. Acceptance breeds self-honesty, leads to accurate perception of yourself and opens doors for all potential improvement in future.
For example, a lot people don’t even accept the fact that they are overeating. When you tell them about their bad habits, they usually become defensive and tell you that they are simply rewarding themselves for their hard work, enjoying what they deserve or that’s who they are. By not accepting who they currently are, they hold inaccurate perception about themselves. How are people going to change their bad habits when they don’t even first accept that they have them? You may want things to be different in the next minute, but at the moment you must learn to accept things as they are. Okay, so currently I do overthink a lot. That’s a bad habit I have right now, and I would like to break it. I told myself honestly some time ago. It was a reflective and sober experience. By doing so, I accessed the power to break it. Visualize your worst self with the bad habits. For instance; Even if you know taking excessive sugar will slowly kill yourself, it’s hard to break that habit because well, you’re still healthy now. In other words, knowing your bad habits intellectually is important, but not sufficient. You also need to experience the consequences it brings emotionally.
We all want to overcome our bad habits and replace them with good ones. This is exactly why new years resolutions are so popular. People are all like “new year, new me! This time I’m really gonna nail it!” However, three to four weeks into the new year, most resolutions have failed. The bad habit’s back from never been gone, and the good ones are gone from never having really been there. Before you can overcome bad habits, you need to acknowledge they’re bad. Just knowing rationally as in eating junk food all the time is unhealthy isn’t enough. You need to feel deeply that your current habit’s not serving you well. For instance, I once used to live pretty unhealthily: eating lots of processed food, exercising by lifting my thumb to hit a button on the remote, going to bed close to midnight and waking up by 6am, stressing like crazy, you know the drill. At the same time, I wondered why I caught colds and felt so tired all the time, why my periods hurt so much, why my hormones came in peaks as high as the Mount Everest and lows as deep as the Mariana Trench. I had discussed my issues with various doctors and all of them confirmed my lifestyle was pretty healthy with some room for improvement, so I wondered what the heck I should do to feel better. Until I learned how to take healthy habits to the next level. I learned to triple my vegetable intake, double my fruit intake, sleep more, exercise more. I identified that what I thought was healthy wasn’t enough. I needed to upgrade my game if I were to shed my colds, 24/7 exhaustion and hormonal issues. I had to identify that what was considered healthy by mainstream health advice wasn’t enough for me.