🙅🏾‍♀️ 🙅🏼‍♂️ 5 Tips to Kick Bad Habits 🙅🏽 💪🏻

5 Tips to Kick Bad Habits

Are you struggling to kick bad habits? Do you even know where to start? Or maybe you know what it is you need to kick but you still find yourself doing it. Bad habits can be anything from staying up too late at night, surfing the internet or scrolling through social media too much during the day; or maybe it’s smoking, overeating junk food or drinking too much. Or maybe it is constantly showing up late to work, appointments, or social events with friends. Whatever your bad habit is, just know you are not alone. Watch the 5 tips to kick bad habits here.

We all have bad habits that we are all trying to change. Bad habits are time consuming, can be destructive, can hinder your health, and can prevent you from achieving your goals... But the good news is these learned patterns can be replaced and I show you how in this week’s episode on 5 tips to kick bad habits. Join 100's of others who watched this video.

Habits become hard to break because they are deeply wired, by constant repetition, into our brains. And when you add pleasure to them — like you have with booze or drugs  for example — the pleasure centres of the midbrain get fired up as well.

But habits are also patterns of behaviour and it is in the breaking of the patterns that is the key to breaking the habits themselves. Usually there is a clear trigger to start the pattern. Sometimes the triggers are emotional — the wanting a drink or cigarette or nail-biting driven by stress or anxiety or boredom..

Other times the trigger is more simply situational and environmental: You see the TV and couch as soon as you hit the front door, and now your brain connects the dots, and eating dinner in front of the TV on the couch is not far behind. More often it is a combination of both — the mix of social anxiety and the party environment leads to your heavier drinking.

But these patterns are also usually wrapped in larger ones: This is where routines come to run our lives. Here is where, as soon as you hit the front door after work, the dumping the shoes, the grabbing a beer, the sitting in front of the TV with dinner, flow together without much thought, just as your morning work-break automatically leads to you and your friend  going outside and chatting while you each have your mid-morning cigarette.

Overall these routine behaviours can serve us well and are good. They keep us from having to reinvent the wheel of our daily lives by making a huge number of decisions all day long, which gives our brains more space to think about other things. The downside of these routinised patterns comes when those patterns land more in the bad or harmful side of the continuum than the good one. So if you have habits you want to break.

The Habit Loop

Bad habits are part of a sequence – trigger, routine, and reward.  This is called The Habit Loop –this is going to help you build awareness about the way you interact with the 

The habit loop is a neurological loop that governs any habit and Understanding these elements can help in understanding how to change bad habits or form better ones.

A trigger is the stimulus that starts the habit, a routine is the actual doing of the bad habit, and the reward is the benefit associated with the bad habit and releases dopamine.  Every time you go through this sequence it gets more ingrained in you until it becomes automatic, which in turn becomes the bad or good  habit.  

There are different things that can be your trigger.  It can be an emotional, situational, environmental, or a combination of these three things that can trigger your bad habit.  Breaking bad habits can be difficult because there are parts of your brain that associates your cravings as “feel good” with the bad habit.

You are going to start to learn and start to notice the things you need to notice to experience when the triggers come, and how to deal with those. But theres one big secret you must know

You’ve got your trigger or habit cues, You’ve got your routine, You’ve got the rewards.

The absolute key here is to understand that you only need to change out the routine - the trigger will be the same and the rewards too– keep the same reward. Just swap out the routine. It can be that simple.

For example say your trigger is time based like at 11 o clock in the morning and everyone goes for a coffee/ tea break, and your reward is the social relaxation of being with co-workers and friends and jut relaxing

And the usual routine is that it takes about 35-40 minutes. The genius behind this is so simple – you just swap the routine. You keep the trigger of the 11 o’clock break and you keep the reward of social relaxation with friends and co workers but you change the routine for it to be 15 minutes  or 20 minutes tops. You’ve kept the same trigger and kept the same reward – you’ve just changed the routine.

Or a popular desired habit is how to get up early and do more exercise early in the morning? The trigger I had was the alarm going off and feeling tired and sluggish so a typical routine was put the snooze button on in the morning that I had set to do exercise. The reward was to just feel better. I started to just switch out the routine – instead of pushing snooze – I would put my trainers at the bottom of my bed with my workout clothes within reach get up and move. The rewards was the same to feel better but actually, afterwards I felt better and even more energetic.

Or let's say, it's 6pm, you’ve had a long day and your trigger was seeing the bottle of wine in the fridge. Your routine could have been to grab a glass while you get dinner ready, with your reward to feel like you can relax and feel better and disconnect from the crazy day you had.

What if you swapped out the glass of wine for a glass of ginger ale/ trying out those new nice flavoured non alcoholic waters with a light treat / snack while you put your favourite music on full blast.

Your reward is the same which is a feeling of unwinding, disconnection  and relaxation from the day.

If you apply this throughout your life – very quickly you will make massive strides in kicking bad habits

Specially what out for time triggers (like 6pm at night with a glass of wine)  The time triggers the habit loop.

For the rest of the day keep an eye for those habit loops. Get curious about your own habit loops – you are going to spot them everywhere – those triggers routines and rewards and have a deep dig look at yourself keep an eye out see what you can see.

They say old habits die hard. Instead say, I am going to dress old habits up as new ones! 

1. Define the behaviour you want to change or develop

Start getting curious about he habit loops you have daily. What is most important to you right now? Choose one  - don’t boil the ocean.. Focus on one thing ...

Getting more exercise or treating your other half better may sound great but they give you little to grasp onto. You need to prime the habit-breaking process by thinking in terms of specific, doable behaviours — like not dumping your shoes in the living room but putting them in your closet; not eating in front of the TV but at the dining room table; going for a half-hour run five days a week; sending your other half a complimentary text once a day, rather than sending them nothing or negative ones. Drill down on the concrete. Get specific.

2: Identify the triggers and rewards

First Identify the triggers – get curious about what the triggers are.. For example The refrigerator may be enough of a trigger to have you go for the beer once you hit the door, just as seeing the junk food on the counter will when you get bored. Or it may be that spark of social anxiety that  triggers you to drink more in social situations ...

By identifying your triggers, you have a way of pushing back and not having that autopilot kick in. Breathe through it to give your head space to cope between stimulus and reaction..  I like to follow a 3-1-5 breathing pattern: for three seconds breathe in, pause for one second, five seconds breathe out. I’ll usually repeat this three to five times. I find this little breathing exercise to be a great instant stress reliever. It’s particularly useful because you can literally do it anywhere. It helps your logical or human part of your brain kick in instead of your reptilian survival part of the brain taking over and hijacking you.

If you have a difficult time knowing what emotionally triggers you, you can work backwards — notice, for example, when you are craving a drink or biting your nails, and slow down breathe, and use your awareness of these behaviours as signals to ask yourself: What is going on emotionally? Why might I be doing this?

Deal with the triggers is important because we’re wanting to break patterns. You may want to notice the triggers themselves. Here you proactively get the junk food or beer out of the house, or when you realise, while driving home, that you are stressed, and you deliberately sit in the car and listen to music that you like while sitting in the driveway, or do a few minutes of deep breathing to relax, rather than automatically marching into the danger-zone of the kitchen.

So like the example I used before the trigger was dinner time - it 6pm you’ve had a long day and your trigger was seeing the bottle of wine in the fridge; your routine could have been to grab a glass while you get dinner ready, so your reward was to feel like you can relax and feel better and disconnect from the crazy day you had - just swap out the glass of wine for a glass of ginger ale/ trying out those new nice flavoured non alcoholic water with a light treat / snack while you put your favourite music on full blast. Different routine.

Your reward is the same which is a feeling of unwinding, disconnection  and relaxation from the day.

3: Swap out the routine - Develop a substitute plan

Breaking habits isn’t about stopping or seeing it as giving something up  but substituting. Here is where you come up with a plan for managing the party without drinking — getting a mocktail and hanging close by your good friend, rather than grabbing a drink and being with stuck with a bunch of strangers.

Or if you are concerned about your binge-eating or snacking during the day on junk food at night, plan to bring two cookies up to your bedroom at 10 o' clock and resolve not to go back downstairs for the rest of the evening to keep you from finding yourself wandering around the kitchen all evening and veering towards the kitchen. Or in order to avoid the temptation of scrolling aimlessly on your phone, go into airplane mode, stay away from electronics, and focus on what you need to get done.

The key here is mapping out the new routine in your head before that triggers have a chance to kick in.

4: Setup a Support System

Get an accountability partner, or a running buddy, or a party buddy, or someone you can call, or an online forum you can tap into when you those cravings start to kick in and you are struggling. Talk to your friend about going to get a quick cup of coffee together rather than standing outside with your cigarettes. Join online forums / meetings. Get around the right people who will support you encourage you hold you accountable.

5: Celebrate – power of progress

At some point in your efforts to break a habit, you reach a point where you go: Why am I bothering to struggle with this? You feel discouraged, you feel you are emotionally making your life seemingly harder and that there is little payoff.

This is normal, it’s the low point in the process, and you need to keep your eyes on the prize. But you also need to make sure you build in a payoff. Here, you deliberately pat yourself on the back for having dinner at the table rather than the couch, even though you won’t immediately feel better. You take the money you would be spending on alcohol or drugs or cigarettes and save it up to buy something else you’ve always wanted—a new outfit, a high-end mini-vacation. Again, you sink into having folks around you to cheer you on and help you realise that you are making progress and are on the right path.

Be persistent and patient

That’s the name of the game, of course: realising that it will take time for the new brain connections to kick in, for the old brain-firings to calm down, for new patterns to replace the old. Don’t beat yourself up for slip-ups or use them as rationales for quitting. Take it one day at the time.

Watch this video for 5 simple tips to help you break bad habits and control cravings and urges. You cannot afford to miss this.

Try the strategies above, and your ability to notice your habit loops will help you analyse the triggers, understand the rewards and help you make better choices to swap out the routines.

So thank you for joining me in todays episode if you found this helpful please share it with others and like us / comment on our facebook, instagram, Linkedin pages...

You can also listen to this on our CimaOmega Podcast channel.

Join us on Social Media by clicking on the links below.

We so appreciate your support and we love creating training for you. Hit reply if you need anything, we would love to serve you. Of course, you can unsubscribe, just please be careful, because that means we can't deliver your emails anymore, even for things you asked/paid for, as all our services are tied to your email address. But you can reach me anytime at [email protected]