Habits

“Choices are at the root of everyone of your results. Each choice starts a behavior that over time becomes a habit.” ~Darren Hardy

On January 1st many people make new year resolutions, and as we are ending the second week in January, I have been thinking about how decisions and habits work hand in hand. Let me explain, many people start the new year out saying they want to lose weight or get healthy. They start strong, and as the weeks past they slowly give up and go back to their old ways.  Why? I believe it has a lot to do with their habits.

Habits are created out of doing something repeatedly. For instance, when we were young, we learned how to ride a bike. The more we rode the bike, the less we thought about it, and, thus, our bike riding became a habit. It’s a cycle of sorts. Anything we do repetitively becomes a habit. And, a pattern, especially a bad habit can be hard to break. Why? Because we are getting something that feels good from that habit and our brains are hard-wired for rewards. We train ourselves to do whatever the pattern is unconscious like we did when we learned to ride a bike. This medium happens when we get triggered. A trigger can be anything. For instance, we get in a fight with a co-worker or our significant other. The conflict caused us to feel upset about the words exchanged. What we do when we have feelings of upset (sadness, anger, etc.) leads to a routine (behavior). The habit (action) is what you do when the trigger happens. For instance, I disagree with a co-worker, and I’m feeling angry and upset.  To make myself feel better, I eat a candy bar.  The behavior calms me down, which now becomes my habit because I have learned eating a candy bar will calm me down.  The more I eat the candy bar after being upset the more unconscious the routine (behavior) becomes.

In other words, bad habits address certain needs in your life. And for that reason, it’s better to replace your bad habits with a healthier behavior that addresses that same need. If you expect yourself to simply cut out bad habits without replacing them, then you’ll have certain needs that will be unmet and it’s going to be hard to stick to a routine of “just don’t do it” for very long. ~ James Clear

How do you change it?

We can take sets in becoming aware of our triggers. You have to be consciously aware of what you are doing and why. The second step is making a conscious effort to change it. The way to do this is with creating a new habit. A habit that gives you positive results. For example, instead of reaching for that class of wine go out for a walk.