A Guide to Breaking Habits and Creating New Rituals
Bad habits interrupt your happiness and prevent you from becoming the greatest version of yourself. They create unnecessary hurdles. They cause more stress which taxes your well being. They waste precious time in your life.
That leads to a very important question: Why do we still do them if we know they create more harm than good?
The answer? Well, there are a few reasons. Before we talk about breaking bad habits and creating new rituals (habits), it’s important to understand why we keep bad habits in the first place.
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The biggest reasons why we develop bad habits and tend to keep them are due to stress, boredom, and bad influence. If we’re being completely honest, that third reason is more of an excuse, because a bad influence is only a bad influence if they have the power to influence you. If you’re easily influenced, it’s often because you’re stressed or bored, e.g. not operating at your full capacity.
Think of the most common bad habits we pick up. Smoking, biting nails, procrastination, excessive doom scrolling, drinking, and overeating come to mind. On some level, these are all due to high levels of stress and boredom.
The first step in breaking bad habits is to take ownership of them.
You have to first realize that a habit is bad before you can decide to take any action to change them. Then, you must realize that they are in your life because they provide you with some sort of value, whether or not you realize it. Think about it: you smoke because it makes you feel relaxed and gets you “out of life” for a few minutes. You might drink excessively to numb the pain of a bad relationship, or hop on social media for hours upon hours because it makes you feel connected to the world. It’s important to first understand that these bad habits provide some sort of value in your life, even though they harm you much more than they provide benefit.
Although bad habits provide you with some sort of value, that is exactly why bad habits are bad: they hurt you much more than the value they provide. Therefore, it’s extremely important to break these bad habits and form new and healthier ones. Here’s how to do it.
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Replace Bad with Good
Without making it seem like an easy process, the best (and perhaps only) way to break a bad habit is simply to replace it with a new and healthy one. If we keep in mind that these bad habits provide us with some sort of benefit, we can then find some other habit to form that provides us with the same value, but without the bad side effects.
Let’s use cigarette smoking for example. People generally smoke cigarettes either due to boredom or stress, but mostly as a way to cope with high levels of stress in their lives. So in this example, you would focus on finding some other means of dealing with high levels of stress. Next time you get in an argument with your spouse, instead of reaching for a cigarette, you can go for a short walk outside. If you’re at work and you just got off a bad call, pull out your phone and watch a funny short video. Or, you can perform a quick and very healthy breathing exercise, which can quickly help you destress. There are many ways to deal with stress other than smoking. The idea here is to find something healthier to do in replacement of smoking that still provides you with the stress relief you want.
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To make the idea of replacing bad habits with good ones a little easier to do, let’s break it down into a step-by-step process.
1. Acknowledge you have a bad habit/take responsibility. Again, you can’t decide to change a habit if you don’t think or realize it’s bad. Write down your bad habits in a list form.
2. Choose an alternative. Go through your list of bad habits, and think to yourself, “What value am I getting out of this bad habit?” Then, think of another habit (a good one) to form in replacement. Write these alternative habits down next to the bad habits they’ll be replacing.
3. Avoid bad influences/triggers. Since you’ll be just starting on your way to replacing your bad habits with good ones, you may still be easily influenced by triggers or enablers. Avoid them as much as possible.
4. Tell others about your goal. When you tell others about your goals, you’ll have a team of people who’ll (hopefully) be keeping you on track. Oftentime, just the fact that others are now expecting you to achieve a certain goal is enough to keep you motivated and focused.
5. Set a time frame. It’s been proven that when people set specific deadlines for goals and tasks, they achieve them much more often. Give yourself a realistic but optimistic deadline to break the bad habit and replace it with a new one. This makes your goal measurable and helps set the pace for your efforts.
Remember,
a bad habit is simply something that brings you value but hurts you more. Replacing it with a good habit can be hard, but it is very achievable and worth the effort. Just visualize the end goal, and keep your spirits up. You may fail once, you may even fail twenty times, but no success has been achieved without failure coming first. You got this.
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