Breaking Bad Habits and Creating Success

The secrete to Breaking Bad Habits like smoking, bad eating habits, even bad study habits is to clearly identify Why you do it and Why you want to change. If you know the 'WHY' the rest of the steps are easy.

Generally we like creating good habits, like exercising regularly and breaking bad ones, like yelling at your kids. So how do you do that?

There are 6 steps to breaking bad habits.

1. Recognizing the pattern as a habit.
2. Developing solid reasons to change and keeping these reasons in the forefront of your mind. This is the 'Why'.
3. Discovering the triggers or patterns that start the behavior in motion.
4. Interrupting the pattern or cycle early in it's process.
5. Discovering and developing a replacement process.
6. Performing the replacement process or processes until the unwanted habit is gone.

A Repeating Pattern is a habit

• When you first learned to drive, you were very tense, trying to watch everything, remember everything. There seemed to be too much to remember. You never thought you'd be able to relax. Now you've been driving the same route to and from work for 10 years. You drive it mostly on a sort of 'auto pilot'. Not really noticing where you are. You automatically break when you see break lights. You automatically stop at the red light. You drive on, suddenly realizing you've gone through a traffic light and don't remember if it was red or green! It takes forceful effort to veer from that route when you go somewhere in the same direction, but a little different.
• When the alarm goes off in the morning, you stager to the kitchen, start the coffee brewing, exercise, get the paper, shower, drink the coffee. What ever your routine is, you do it without having to think. This is a good thing, because you don't think too clearly first thing in the morning.
• You've been smoking for 10 years. When you finish a meal, you automatically light a cigarette. Do you often find a cigarette in your hand and don't remember putting it there?
• Whenever your family has a disagreement, they start yelling at each other. The loudest person wins. So then whenever you disagree with your spouse you start yelling. The pattern was built over the years of your childhood.
• You grew up talking about professional sports. You can remember the names and positions of players from 10 years ago. Sport connections are very strong in your mind. But you can't remember your anniversary date. After all, it only comes up once a year.

Yes, even emotional reactions are often created by repeated actions. This creates what is called a trigger pattern. I used to apologize and make myself really small whenever I was criticized, even if the criticism was completely unwarranted. That was my automatic reaction based on years of repeating that response. What automatic reactions do you have? What are your 'hot buttons'? Is it seeing dirty dishes in the sink? Having someone criticize you? A neighbor not respecting property lines? Breaking Bad Habits like these is really hard.

Good habits like brushing your teeth and exercising regularly are habits that help you and you don't want to try breaking. Bad Habits are those that are detrimental to you in some way. Good habits can become bad habits if done excessively. Take exercising, done 3 times a week or even 5 times a week is fine, but exercising twice a day, 7 days a week is excessive even if you're a professional athlete.

Breaking bad habits is not done by the force of your will or by self discipline. All these strong connections that nature has built in creating the pattern are not easy to overcome. In breaking bad habits, you're up against mother nature, So don't beat yourself up when you slip. But don't give up because you're up against nature. We beat nature all the time with air conditioning, sun screen, furnaces, medicine.

You can compare breaking bad habits to overcoming the force of gravity by a rocket ship to the moon: 90% of the fuel expenditure is used in going the first few miles. Very little is used in the rest of the 238,000 mile journey. Or you can compare breaking bad habits to running a marathon. Most of the effort is near the end, when it's hard to keep putting one foot in front of the other. It probably depends on what the habit is, to where the effort needs to go.

Define Reasons to Change

Discovering Triggers

Interrupt the Pattern

Develop an alternate pattern

Perform the replacement process

Repeat

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