Habits are difficult to break. They are rooted in our minds. Of course, we can choose which habits to change once we know how they function. There are hundreds of habits that influence our everyday life. They guide us from morning to night. Research findings revealed that 90% of what we do daily follows routines so complete that the behavior can be predicted.
Did you know that most of a person’s everyday life is determined not by conscious, deliberate choices but by mental processes put into motion by our environmental habits? After all, we are creatures of habit. Hundreds of habits influence our everyday behavior. Habits guide how we get dressed, talk to our spouse, kids, and friends, what we eat for lunch, and how we interact at work and fall asleep. Each of our habits has a different cue and reward system. Some habits can be simple, and others are complex, drawing on our emotional triggers. But every habit, no matter how difficult, can be changed.
Decide to Change
To modify a habit, you must decide and be willing to change it. On a conscious level, you must accept the hard work of identifying the habit and the cues and rewards that drive the habit’s routines and finding an alternative. You must understand that you have control and be self-conscious about changing the old habit for one that better serves you.
Once habits develop, our brain doesn’t register the behavior anymore. The activities become automatic and require little effort. It’s like you are on autopilot. Even the most unpredictable people have habits. Habits aren’t necessarily bad, but some can be very problematic when the habit negatively affects your relationships with the people around you, and it affects your mental and physical health.
Identify the Habit and Work on the Alternative
Change will not be easy or fast. But with time and effort, you can change or reshape your habit. So, how do you identify your habit and change the behavior?
- Identify the habit-as with habits; the routine is the most obvious one. It is the one you want to change. The routine is that you are late to work every day because of the kids. You promise yourself that tomorrow will be different. But tomorrow, the habit retakes hold.
- Habits aren’t just built into our nature. We actively form relationships between environmental cues and how we behave towards them. A habit’s strength is determined by the number of times you’re exposed to a specific environmental cue and the quality of your experience with the behavior. Unknown origins- We all form relationships according to our experiences and repeat them without considering if they work for us. It’s natural to learn a habit based on our life experience. While the habit has allowed us to survive, it has also created a problem. Our behaviors have formed a strong relationship with certain behaviors we do not recall. The connection we started when our senses were on overload at the time, or we responded to immediate pressures when focusing on something else important to us. Without isolating how these habits were formed, we struggle to remove them from our lives. Most cues that strengthen habitual behaviors are based on emotional connections, memories, and experiences that we may or may not remember or can explicitly label. Habits don’t start as habits. They begin as a single instance of behavior. After doing them once or twice in the same conditions and they work for you, you will probably continue doing it.
- Identifying the cue. Experiments have shown that almost all habitual cues fit into one of five categories: Location, Time, Emotional state, Other people, and Immediately preceding action. So, write it down if you are attempting to figure out the cue for getting late to work. Write down five things the moment the urge hits. (A) Where are you (still in bed)? (B) What time is it? (7:45 AM), (C) What is your emotional state (sad)? (D) Who else is around (no one)? (E) What action preceded the urge? (on your cellphone scrolling through social media)
- What’s the Plan? Once you have identified the cue, the loop driving your behavior, you can shift your behavior. So far, you have learned that a habit is a choice that we deliberately make at some point and continue doing almost every day. So you definitely need a plan. Set your alarm earlier, wake the children, get yourself and the kids ready, and head out the door. You will not pick up your cell phone and spend time on social media.
Changing a habit can be difficult, but you need a place to start. Some changes take a long time and repeated effort. But once you gain power over the old habit, you have changed.
