The Joe Dickinson Team
by Zac Czikowsky
Bad habits can hamstring your life. From smoking cigarettes, to watching too much television, bad habits form because we allow them to. While it is easier to prevent bad habits than breaking them, there are some proven steps to breaking that bad habit.
It’s much harder to quit habits cold-turkey than it is to simply replace them with better habits. This can be seen with people who are addicted to smoking. While some people find success with quitting, the majority of smokers switch to healthier alternatives like a nicotine patch, or even a vape.
The same is true for most habits. If you find that your late-night snacking is preventing you from losing weight, but you simply find it difficult to quit snacking altogether, try replacing the snacks. Instead of unhealthy corn chips or potato chips, snack on a bag of lightly salted almonds, or a fruit salad.
Try grabbing a pen and a piece of paper. Write down your top 3 worst habits, or write down the one habit you want to break three times. Next to those habits, write out some ways that you can replace the habit with a healthy alternative. A study from 2003 sought to find out the best ways to start good habits, and found that “conscious planning is an effective tool in replacing well-learned habits with new habits” (Holland). Make sure to write it down and set it as a goal, so you’ll be able to craft a tangible plan and work towards that goal!
If a habit you have is that you stay up too late, try finding a time each night where you start reading a book. While this won’t immediately break your habit of staying up late, it is better to read at midnight rather than watching netflix. Also, reading is a great way to relax, and you may find you want to fall asleep sooner anyway! By replacing the habit with a better one, you take the pressure off yourself and you also better your life!
Stress is one of the quickest ways to form a bad habit. I can think of a number of habits, including biting your nails, drinking, and picking at your skin, that all originate in stress. When you start to feel stressed, try going for a long walk to calm down, or work on some breathing exercises. For tips and tricks on how to avoid stress, click here.
The main trick is to be mindful of the cause of your stress and how you react to it. Very few of us can actually stop stress from happening, as it is often an involuntary reaction. What we should strive to do, however, is recognize when and how stress affects us, as well as the cause of the stress.
Once you’ve accepted that you are stressed out, you’ll know to avoid bad habits in favor of good ones. Feeling stressed? Go for a walk. Biting your nails? Treat yourself to a chocolate bar. Feel like a drink or a cigarette? Try an iced tea. By recognizing how we react to stress and by replacing those bad reactions with healthier alternatives, we can control our stress and use it as a way to live a healthier life!
