To kill your bad habits, you first need to be aware of why you have so many bad habits in your life.
Bad habits are mainly always caused by two reasons.
Stress & Boredom.
Whether it is scrolling through socials or eating junk food. These habits are always mainly triggered by stress and boredom
And the reason why its difficult to cut them off is each of these bad habits provide some sort of benefit to you, even if the majority of it is bad.
For example, excessively scrolling through social media might give you the feeling of being connected and up to date with your friends.
However, at the same time it decreases your attention, hugely impacts your level of productivity and even overwhelms you with stress. It also takes the most important thing in your life which is time.
Its not easy to kill of these habits so we cant just simply “stop doing it”. Such advice rarely works.
Below i have some questions you can ask yourself to become more aware of the trigger points that causes you to do the habits .
The next step is to have belief.
When i started, i used to think that to change the habits i already have, I needed to change myself completely.
And i realized later on for that to be false.
you already were someone without the bad habits. So It’s unlikely that you had these habits all your life.
for example;
You don’t need to quit smoking,
you just need to return to being a non smoker.
Even if it was days, months or even years ago , you’ve already gone a period in your life without this habit. So you most definitely can do it again.
Once you’ve acquired these 2, you’ve basically set the foundation to build your new habits.
Go for a run.
start journaling.
devote yourself to becoming a lifetime learner.
The habits can be literally as easy as making your bed every single morning after you wakeup. However, it has to be an activity that takes you a bit out of your comfort zone, but not so hard to the point you procrastinate on it.
And even if you fail, that is totally fine.
As Steve Kamb says, “When you screw up, skip a workout, eat bad foods, or sleep in, it doesn’t make you a bad person. It makes you human.”
Breaking bad habits takes time and effort, but mostly it takes discipline.
A lot of the people including myself fail and try countless ways to keep the good habits in place.
And the reality is, even after you reach to a point where you are disciplined you still would slip away once in a while.
You cant beat yourself for failing, because success is never a straight line.
And because it isn’t, Majority give up.
But sometimes a lot of us give up because we’re doing it completely wrong and we don’t realize it, here are some 3 common mistakes while trying to attain new habits;
1. Trying to change everything at once
solution: pick one thing and do it well.
When you focus on multiple areas its hard to see much progress or better yet see any progress at all.
Andrew Huberman speaks about this in how to have goals and achieve them, and he also mentioned that the easiest way to achieve a goal faster is by picking one thing or activity and giving your full attention and focus on it.
2. Starting with a habit that is too big
solution: make it so easy you cant say no.
Want to do 50 pushups per day? Start with something easy like 5 or 10.
3. Assuming small changes don’t add up
Solution: get one percent better everyday.
We often neglect small changes because they don’t often show huge results.
If you go to the gym 3 days in a row, you’re still out of shape
if you saved a few amount of money, you’re still not financially free
And so on.
A small change can bring you to a life that is quite unimaginable.
If you look closely and study about successful people and how they achieved such success, you can always notice that they go through a huge valley of disappointment.
huge streaks of nothing but failure and losses. Then suddenly they breakthrough and get nothing but wins.
It can feel absolutely frustrating when you realize you don’t see any results for months.
But always remember, the most powerful outcomes are delayed.
When you finally break through , people will call it an overnight success.
The outside world only sees the inevitable success without seeing what went behind the scenes.
And it all starts by building your life with habits that serve you well.
To your potential,
Aaish