How to Kick A Bad Habit
Have you ever undergone these anxious and troublesome situations in your past experiences? Burning the midnight oil to finish your English assignments before tomorrow morning's course, or continuously nodding off in class because you stayed up late until 4 am for playing online games all night long. Do these situations sound familiar to you? Regardless of which kind of bad habit you have, we all share the same experiences of being trapped or disturbed by bad habits while we are working or studying. Although there has hadyou can find a great deal of information of teaching about how to kick a bad habit, it is still an insoluble problem unless you start to create a methodical system. According to James Clear (2018), who is an expert and a writer dedicated to researching habits. His essays are often embodied in many noted newspapers and magazines like The New York Times, Time Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine, etc. Besides, his online course, The Habits Academic, has educated more than 10,0 00 leaders and managers. In his world-renowned book, Atomic Habits, the author describes the importance of habits and how to change your bad habits with an organized system. Kicking a bad habit may be extremely challenging, but in fact, it only requires tiny changes if you realize a set of rules—The Three Laws of Behavior Change—to achieve remarkable results.
In the beginning, you have to be aware of your habits. and try to make “cues” invisible. Anything that may distract your attention can be cues, like your phones or a TV. Learning how to be conscious of our behavior is one of the most challenging things. Besides, we can use “the habit scorecard” to help us recognize our habits. For instance, you can recall a series of behaviors before you go to school in the morning. First, you may get up, brush your teeth, and then games play on your mobile phone. After listing all the behaviors on your scorecard, you can start to ask yourself: Is this a bad habit or a good habit? Then, try to give all the behaviors with a plus sign or a minus sign. What's more, remove these “cues” from the environment around you, and you can avoid continuously approaching these cues. By doing so, bad habits may no longer be the obstruction that hinders us. The process of changing behavior always begins with consciousness, and we can make beneficial responses to stop r epeating these bad habits by recognizing your behaviors and eliminating the cues successfully.
Habit Scorecard
Next, you can try to avoid falling into the illusions of bad habits so that they may be less attractive. Once we feel a specific desire, our brain will try to handle basic potential motivation. While our habits deal with the motivation smoothly, the brain may start to emphasize the key points and mark related behaviors for utilizing in the future. In other words, when we encounter something repeatedly, our brain is likely to come up with a desire of doing certain behavior again. For instance, as soon as we feel stressed, we may tend to go online shopping. As time passes, our brain may simply take “online shopping” as one way to decompress. However, although going online shopping will help our brain release dopamine, it also makes us become a shopaholic . Even without impulse buying, you can still relax yourself with a healthier method. Thus, we are prone to overemphasize the advantages of bad habits. By rebuilding our mindset of bad habits, we can have different viewpoints of these beha viors, so they may not be as appealing as before.
“Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don't want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change”, said James Clear (p.28). With these three steps: identify your bad habits, rethink the benefits of bad habits, and increase the difficulties in doing bad behaviors, you may gradually reap a new and healthy lifestyle.
James Clear
Cited Sources
Clear, J (2018). Atomic Habits. Retrieved from: https://reurl.cc/2ojVk6
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