Can't Break Your Negative Habit? Change it!

This post aims to help you tackle negative habits and is not intended to be used for dependency related illnesses such as drug and alcohol addiction. Addressing these conditions should be done under the supervision of your primary care physician or a specialist.

Habits

We all have them. We all need them. They come in the good variety and the very bad for you variety. Have you ever noticed that it seems next to impossible to kick a bad one and start a new and healthy one? Have you every stopped to ask yourself why that is? Now look, I’m not an expert in a lot of things and I do not have the medical degree’s of my colleagues here at Live Well, but what I do have is nearly two decades worth of experience in confronting my bad habits and forming new ones. So in a sense, I have become an expert on habits… or at least MY habits. I hope by the end of this post, through my experience, you can find some insight into your own habits and maybe have a point of reference to look at when you start out to set your new and healthy habits.

What even is a habit?

Silly question, I know. But one I think is worth analyzing. James Clear, the New York Times Best Selling Author of Atomic Habits, defines them as:

“small decisions you make and actions you perform every day”.

The Dictionary defines them as:

“a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up”

and I define them as “That stupid f@!$ing thing I wish I would stop doing”. Or at least, I did define them as that at one point. To me, now, habits are the one bit of my life that I truly have control over and once I started talking about them with adjectives liked healthy, exciting, motivating, and fun and stopped using lazy, bad, awful, and hard I was actually able to influence some change in my life.

What influences a habit?

I think to really understand habit formation you have to have a cold hard look at the influences in your life. This is probably best illustrated through negative habit formation and likely something you already have experience with. Imagine this, if you’re like me, you drink a cup coffee every single day. It’s a routine, like clockwork. You wake up, shuffle your feet straight to the kitchen, mumble something incoherent to the rest of your household, and then washing out yesterday’s coffee from the Moka pot. Now at this point, I want you to ask yourself what here is the habit? Is it drinking coffee first thing in the morning? Is it grinding the beans? Washing the pot or grumbling at my family? What really helped me to break habits I didn’t want or that weren’t serving me was to be honest with myself about what the habit was and what was influencing it and then make an honest decision with whether or not I was okay with that influence. In this example, the coffee isn’t the habit. The caffeine is. That’s my internal habitual kick first thing in the AM. But, if you asked my wife, she would say I have a habit of being a jerk in the morning. Everything else is just the routine. It’s the dance I do on my way to repetition and consistency. I am influenced by a drug my brain has come to rely on and my routine influences the outward expression of the habit. Before I lose you, you can still have coffee (If it serves you and isn’t stopping you from meeting your goals!) or not, idk I’m not the dietician around here. I still drink coffee everyday, but the point I’m making is that once I identified the influences in my life, I was able to get honest about the negativity of my habits and form a plan to change it.

cut coffee out and be grumpy for the rest of your life…

Cool, I already knew that though. Now what?

Well now we change them! The best part about habit forming is that you only have to do them once a day! I like coffee and I don’t actually have a problem with the caffeine (not medical advice) and I find the whole pedantic dance I do every morning to be cathartic. What’s easier in your opinion? Cutting coffee cold turkey or making a point to say good morning to everyone? That was rhetorical, cut coffee out and be grumpy for the rest of your life… I jest. Analyzing your current habits is the first step to forming new ones. I promise its easier to modify an existing habit to serve you then it is for you to try and just start being a different person one day. After all, we are our habits. The good news too is that habits snowball. Positive changes into one have momentum into another and the more you do the less effort it takes. Until one day trying out new habits is like trying out new hobbies. I am at a point now where I can say things like “I’d like to play my guitar everyday” and I know with a near certainty that I will pick that thing up, strum for 7 minutes, and stop 3 months later when I remember being good at guitar was my fathers dream for me and I have other things to focus on.

Your habits should serve YOU

I don’t mean to keep making jokes or making light of a very serious subject. It’s a habit of mine, but a habit that has served me in forming life long friendships and healthy relationships in my life. There are also two sides to being cynical and I just prefer to laugh. Your habits, should always serve you in this way. They should be guide-stones, not hurdles. In that sense, it’s OK to stop picking up the guitar everyday if you aren’t getting the value from it you thought you would. Healthy habits aren’t hard. They’re daily routines. They’re incremental lateral moves that total up to change over time. In same way being grumpy in the morning every morning for 5 years made me a dick, so too did pretending to be happy in the morning over time end up making me actually pretty happy in the morning. The routine influenced the habit, the habit over time was serving me in a positive way, and therefore I don’t even think about doing it anymore. I am now a person that rolls out of bed, shuffles his feet to the kitchen, and greets his family on the way. Boom, not a jerk… in the morning.

Okay so modifying my existing habits isn’t so hard, but where do I start?

I think most people, at this point, would tell you to look in the mirror. To start with external life changes. Maybe hit the gym an extra day, wrap your fingernails so you quit anxiously chewing on them, pick up that guitar and make your Dad proud of you for once… but I personally think feeling beautiful on the inside will snowball into positive changes on the outside. Start with the little voice that beats you up everyday for not being the ideal version of yourself. Modify the dialogue to say something nice. If you want my true advice, stop saying things to yourself like “You ALWAYS do this” or “That will NEVER happen ” (Thinking in absolutes). Because sometimes you don’t do whatever that is and everything that can happen, will happen (Murphy’s Law). The next time you engage in an external habit that isn’t serving you, instead say something like “I want to change this”. You don’t have to start changing habits today, but you can make believing your habits can be changed into your new habit. Modify the dialogue again the next time you engage in the habit to say “I am going to change this”. Then when that sentence starts saying itself, look at practical ways to influence change in the habit. Disrupt the routine, modify the expression, change the level of engagement.. but most importantly, do it again. and again. and again. Until you’re not doing anything at all except engaging in your new habit.

What’s next?

Dream big. Habits aren’t mountains, they’re molehills. They’re very summit-able. The change in your life can be DRAMATIC the moment you realize you are capable of conquering your self-imposed adversities. You’ll never know who you are until you look back on who you were. Believe in yourself and be patient. The change doesn’t have to be dramatic, just know that it can. A small decision to change your life today can be the catalyst to an entirely new life, built upon healthy habits that you do each and every day that serve you. I’d wish you luck, but you really don’t need it. It doesn’t take luck. It takes time, a little bit of effort, and a single honest conversation.

• Summary of main points

1. Our habits are influenced by our routines
2. It’s easier to modify an existing habit than it is to form a new one
3. Our habits should serve us
4. Start by believing you can change and influence your habits
5. Dream big. You are capable.

• Call to action

  Analyze a single habit in your life. Write down what it is and how you engage in it. Identify the routine and look for an opportunity to modify the habit. Do this every day for 6 weeks and then reanalyze the habit. In a journal, note the change. Is it different? Is it better? Was the change hard? Where are you now and what can you do in the next 6 weeks to introduce more change.