Habits

“A business executive’s habits are amongst the most important factors that determine whether he or she will be a success – or a failure” J. Paul Getty

What are habits?

Habits are repeated behaviours, thoughts and actions that are automatic. Habits are useful, if not essential to life: we simply wouldn’t be able to function without habits. From the moment you wake and throughout the day, our day is full of those automatic actions that move us smoothly through life.

Think of any action that we take, even the most mundane like brushing our teeth. Imagine if you had to think consciously about brushing your teeth every day – twice a day. Then getting dressed and tying your shoelaces. By the time you are ready for the office you would already be exhausted and we haven’t even mentioned all the habits of etiquette – the social glue that keeps society functioning.

We have survived as a species exactly because habits are automatic. In evolutionary terms, this leaves us free to concentrate on physical threats to our existence or opportunities to find food.
All well and good then. Habits keep us alive and help us to learn new important skills. Except, not all habits are useful.

Bad Habits

As we have already suggested, habits are automatic, meaning that you don’t need to think about them. If any habit results in negative results, it’s a bad habit.

What is a bad habit

A bad habit is any repeated thought or action that results undesirable outcomes. Bad habits can also be the language that you use. Thoughts, words and actions are all linked together. Words can influence your thoughts, which then influence your actions. So be very careful what you say, because habitual negative language, will affect your thinking. If the results in your life aren’t what you want, then examine the language that you use.
Other bad habits may be just mindless activity. Do you eat when you are not hungry, in front of the TV? This is just a mindless bad habit.

Breaking bad habits

Once you become aware of the bad habit, you have already begun the process of breaking that bad habit. You are now aware. It is no longer mindless. This is therefore the first thing you should focus on when trying to break a bad habit. Become aware of it. Eat thoughtfully. Ask yourself ‘Am I really hungry?’’Do I really like the taste of this food?’ ‘How does it make me feel?’ When you become mindful about your habits, those that don’t serve you are exposed for what they are. You will be surprised to find that you can then easily change those habits.

Small habits

To change a small habit, simply perform a new habit for 21 consecutive days. It should then be permanent.

Another way to change small habits is to use reminders and props. Say that, for instance, you are in the habit of misplacing your keys. You mindlessly place them down when you arrive home. How about if you actually designate a place for these keys to live. E.g. A small saucer or tray near the front door. This is where the keys live. Make an intention to decide a place where the keys will go. Then go and put the keys there now. Now write a little note for yourself to put the keys back every day. Put this note with the keys and take the note with you the next day. It won’t take long before you are habitually putting the keys back in their new home. Once it is a habit, you can forget the note. It will be automatic.

Large habits

Sometimes bad habits are just too large change in one go. Let’s use an example of over-eating. Perhaps after years of eating too much of the wrong foods, you find yourself a little over-weight. The first thing many people do is to try to change everything all at once – the crash diet. Diets don’t work for many reasons, but the main one is internal resistance to change. We are hard wired to resist change. Any change could be a threat to our existence. Your body is also physiologically designed to get you to eat. If you stop eating, many processes in your body switch on to avoid starvation. In short your body fights to get you to eat. There is only one winner in this battle.

What’s the answer then?

You can bypass your body’s in built drive to eat, by chunking down the habit to its smallest components. So in our overeating example, this large habit can be broken down into individual meals or snacks, or even parts of meals. In his book the Compound Effect, Darren Hardy talks about making the smallest of changes, to bypass our tendency to avoid change. Tiny changes go undetected by our subconscious mind. Minute changes to your eating habits will not threaten your existence.

So you can remove one sugary snack per week from our diet and this will not cause too much heartache. You could choose Monday morning as a snack free zone.

Now you might say to yourself, that such a small change and it will have no effect, so why bother? Well this is where the Compound Effect helps. Yes, removing one snack per week will have a negligible effect on your calorie intake, say 200 kcal. However, that is 10,400 kcal per year. If 3,500 kcal collates to one pound of fat, then this would equate to nearly 3 pounds lost over the year, with almost no effort.

And that is not all. Once you have this mini habit down, you could remove another snack per week. Then another and another.
If you have never tried this method, I can assure you that it gathers momentum. Slowly all manner of little habits will change. Within a year you will be transformed. I promise you.

By the way if you are looking to lose weight contact me and I will show you how I did it.