Breaking Bad Habits

This time of year, many people are working on starting new habits. While I love and encourage this idea some (many?) people would be better served by breaking a few of their bad habits first.

The steps to break bad habits have been well studied:

1. RECOGNIZE: the behavior AND the trigger.
   • What triggers your bad behavior? For me if I didn't eat breakfast or have a lunch with me it creates a trigger that allows me to eat bad foods offered. For some its an emotional trigger, environmental or location. 
2. ALTER: the environment or access to the trigger
   • If you are triggered to drink every time you go to the bar with Tom, don't go to the bar and tell Tom you're busy and will see him in a few months. Once you recognize the trigger you can put steps in place to avoid it. This is the positive side of out of sight, out of mind. If you can make it difficult for yourself to access the trigger you'll be much less likely to participate in the bad habit.
3. REWARD/PUNISH: Create a punishment/reward system in response to the habit
   • We live based on rewards and punishments. If you reward yourself when respond well to a trigger you'll be more likely to respond that way in the future. If you endure even a simple punishment for a bad habit you'll be less likely to repeat the behavior.  These can be anything from the rubber band snap to a loss of phone privileges or anything else you can do to tell your brain that habit is no longer supported.
4. REPLACE: Initiate a replacement behavior
   • This is a bit counterintuitive but a study by Fritz et al found that if you perform a replacement behavior after you gave in to your bad habit you activate a part of your brain that helps you to overcome the bad habit in the future. So no matter how you responded to the trigger, good or bad, you immediately perform your replacement habit. ie. People around you are drinking, trigger, leads to you having a beer. Immediately do something good instead (yes even after you gave into the bad)- drink a glass of water and do a breathwork session. You can insert anything into this.

While this may seem simplistic truly going through the steps to break your bad habits can be life changing. If we want to be healthier, happier and better the simplest path is the stop being unhealthy, unhappy and making things so hard. Good luck and remember do that one thing to get a little bit healthier today! ​

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