Listen to “Realistic Plan to Eliminate Bad Habits”.
Sometimes, habits can lead us astray—whether it’s turning to comfort food when we’re sad, or taking a cigarette break when we’re stressed.
Habits are formed through practice and repetition, and the same is true when it comes to breaking them. Nothing happens until the pain of remaining the same outweighs the pain of change.
The first step to real change is to be more compassionate towards ourselves, slow down, and be more observant. The goal is to observe without judgement by being curious and trying to understand why you do what you do, rather than beating yourself up about it.
There’s a huge difference between self-reflection and negative self-talk. Negative self-talk is destructive, and it doesn’t motivate us to make changes. Instead, it decreases our self-esteem by declaring: “I can’t do anything right”.
The story that goes on inside our heads is a thousand times worse than the reality of our daily lives. Instead of thinking negatively, we should force ourselves to be nice and positive to ourselves.
There is no reason to punish yourself. When you like yourself, you naturally want to take care of yourself. More importantly, it feels good to take care of yourself. This is the real goal of feeling good about yourself, your body, your life. Self-discipline is a form of self-love.
Your realistic plan for eliminating bad habits:
1.Learn to recognise the root cause of your bad habit
Recognising the causes of your bad habits is crucial to overcoming them. Most of the time, bad habits are simply a way of dealing with stress and boredom. In some ways, these behaviours provide a benefit to you, even if they are bad for you in other ways.
Bad habits address certain needs in your life. For example, if you smoke when you’re stressed, then it’s a bad plan to “just stop smoking” when that happens. Instead, you should come up with a different way to deal with stress and adopt that new behaviour instead of having a cigarette.
2.Think back to how your life was before you adopted the bad habit
We often think that to break bad habits we need to become an entirely new person. The truth is that you already have it in you to be someone without your bad habits.
It’s unlikely that you had these bad habits all of your life. You don’t need to quit smoking, you need to return to being a non–smoker. You don’t need to transform into a healthy person, you need to return to being healthy.
Even if it was years ago, you have already lived without this bad habit, which means you can do it again.
3. Replace and track
Instead of trying to stop doing something, start doing something else that you enjoy.
You can create a habit list to track whether what you wanted to do, is what you did.
- Drink a glass of water first thing in the morning
- Take a daily walk for at least 30 mins
- Do two workouts a week
- Go to bed 15 minutes earlier than usual
- Take 5-10 minutes of silence/meditation daily
- Eat a veggie-based meal once a day
- Avoid processed or packaged foods
Choose 2 things from the list and try implementing them daily.
You can check the steps you have taken daily or add meditation or workout times into the DeepH App. It’s easy to use and enables you to quickly and efficiently track your daily routines and energy levels.
There are also positive affirmations and meditations to eliminate negative thoughts. It’s a simple yet powerful tool that can help you to create a lifestyle based on self-love.
