Although many people resort to willpower to fight their bad habits, using an intentional process to eradicate bad habits will set you up for success. Try the steps below to help:
1. Identify Your Triggers
You’ll need to identify the triggers for your bad habits. What are those experiences and environments that cause you to engage in negative behaviour? Maybe you can’t stand being bored, so you end up using a quick and easy behaviour to alleviate that boredom, such as scrolling through social media for hours. That keystone bad habit leads to other bad habits such as comparing yourself to people you see on social media. The key to stopping the keystone behaviour isn’t just deleting your social media apps. Instead, it’s preventing your trigger: being bored.
2. Be Specific About Your Habits
After identifying your triggers, be specific about how you want to change your habits. Before you can reach any goal, you must be very specific about what that goal is. Specifically describe the bad habit you want to eradicate in as much detail as possible, and then describe the good habit with which you will replace it. Using the example above, if you want to eradicate your bad habit of scrolling through Instagram for hours, you might want to identify how long is too long for scrolling, your exact triggers, and a good habit to replace the bad one. Instead of scrolling through Instagram when you’re bored, for example, replace that social media use with a walk.
3. Replace Your Bad Habits
Once you decide to pick a specific activity to replace your bad habit, you’ll want to choose a new habit that’s going to provide a similar reward or benefit — otherwise, the replacement won’t work, and you’ll be left feeling dissatisfied and tempted to return to the bad habit. If your bad habit is reaching for a chocolate bar when you’re hungry at your desk, replace the chocolate bar with a sweet but healthy item like fruit. You’ll get the sweet flavour without filling your body with refined sugars.
4. Measure Your Progress
Once you’ve gotten specific about your habits, you also need to be clear about how you’ll measure your progress as you eradicate them. How else will you know when you’ve reached your goal, after all? When it comes to a goal such as losing weight, measurement is easy. You just look at the scale. But when aiming to eradicate a bad habit, measuring your progress can be a little more difficult. Decide how you want to measure your progress and, again, be specific. Quantifiable measurements are always best, if possible.
5. Increase the Pressure
Decide what kind of pressure you need for your best performance. Do you need self-inflicted pressure by way of checklists, daily scorecards, and tracking apps? Or do you need outside accountability, such as competition with others, accountability buddies, or perhaps a counsellor? Choose whether you need external or internal pressure, and then add that source of pressure to your habit-changing efforts. You can also increase pressure by implementing a reward and punishment system whenever you meet or fail to meet your goals. If you fail to meet your goal, you might give yourself a self-inflicted penalty, such as not getting to go out with friends. If you meet your goal, you might give yourself a reward, such as a massage or your favourite meal.
6. Plan, Plan, Plan
Before you even embark on eradicating your bad habit, create a pre-situation plan for success. Envision yourself being successful. How will you respond? How will you achieve that success? Likewise, put together a plan for if you fail. How will you respond? How will you ensure you get back on track?
7. Write it Down
Lastly, make sure you write your plans down. In fact, write down all the information above. Don’t just keep the specifics in your head. You’ll want a detailed record to come back to in the events of both successes and failures. That way, you’ll know what path to take no matter what happens, and you also won’t end up abandoning your efforts at the first sign of potential failure or temptation.
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