Have you decided it’s time to break that annoying habit you’ve been practicing forever? Good for you. Biting your nails is not exactly classy, while cracking your fingers can be downright annoying. Depending on how long you’ve been irritating yourself and others with these bad habits, breaking them can be either hard – or harder.
However, it can be done and the solution is really rather simple. Follow our 3 Ways to Break a Bad Habit strategy to see if you can break them on your own.
How to break a bad habit
Be conscious
Becoming conscious of when, and why, you perform these annoying actions is the first step to stopping them. Pay attention to when you do it, as well as the circumstances, if the action repeats itself regularly, say when you’re bored or stressed, then you can understand what triggers it. Also, try to become conscious of what you’re feeling when you do it. This may also help you understand your bad habit.
Write it down
Keep a log of your bad habit for at least one week. Once you have a baseline of your actions, you will be better able to understand the triggers for your annoying actions. Note the circumstances and emotional context as well, to help you make yourself even more conscious of the action.
Make a switch
As a quick fix, replace that annoying action with some other – less annoying – action. Stress the less annoying thing here folks. You don’t want to replace cracking your knuckles with biting your nails, right? Ideally, this replacement will be a temporary action, used to help you overcome the compulsive action.
“Meditation may also help break bad habits,” according to Janet L. Wolfe, PhD, a clinical psychologist. “Once you have identified the triggers, you can do meditation to distract yourself next time you are in a trigger situation.”
If you’re having trouble breaking bad habits on your own, even while using our 3 Ways to Break a Bad Habit, our personal coaching services may be able to help. Feel free to get in touch with us today to begin breaking those bas habits now.
(Excerpts taken from: 3 Easy Steps to Breaking Bad Habits, @ WebMD.)
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