Bad Habits

We have all got bad habits that we would like to quit. Some might be more noticeable than others and some, like overeating, might be life threatening. Whichever way you look at it, bad habits, no matter how big or small are darned hard to quit.

Bad habits are a multimillion dollar industry. Just think about how much money is spent on quit smoking or weight loss programs. Next time you go shopping take a look at the products available to help you quit biting your nails, and you will see what I mean. If breaking bad habits was easy the industry wouldn’t exist.

Well-meaning friends are always quick to offer advice; I mean how hard can it be? You are overweight, just eat less. Problem solved.

The truth is, you don’t need to be told why the habit is bad for you. You know all the reasons why you should give up your bad habit, so all the well-meaning advice goes straight over your head. It would be much more helpful if people were more positive about the advice they gave. It is more important to know about the positive, up side of stopping the bad habit. Thinking about good results is more likely to trigger an incentive to quit.

If knowing the reasons why a habit is bad for you, or the advantages of giving it up were all that was needed, you would have given up the habit long ago. What is needed is the will power to make it happen, but how do you get that?

Incentive is what you need and I don’t mean that you could save money if you gave up smoking, that is just another up side to giving up the habit. What I mead is something new, some angle that has not occured to you before, a moment when the light goes on.

It is often surprising what triggers the incentive to quit. Here is an interesting example. I have just read a story about a young woman who put on so much weight she was virtually a recluse. At a size 26 she was clinically obese ,and age 20 unable to enjoy life. The incentive came when her boyfriend told her that he was sick of leading half a life. He didn’t worry about her weight, he just wanted them to get out and enjoy life. That was the trigger. She loved him and wanted him to be happy, so she started a serious weight loss program. Of course she wanted to lose weight for herself, but the incentive was never there. Her boyfriends wish for them to enjoy themselves provided that incentive.

Bad habits that are well entrenched are always going to be difficult to quit, but it’s amazing what results people can achieve when something triggers the incentive. Years ago I knew a woman aged thirty who had bitten her nails all her life. One day she saw me apply cuticle cream to my nails. I had just got engaged and was wearing a diamond ring, so was giving my nails extra care. She had also become engaged but was embarrassed about her nails which were bitten to the quick. She purchased some cream, applied it every day and set a goal to have long nails by her wedding day. She could have stopped biting her nails at any time, but it was the wedding that became the incentive.

Reason’s are not incentives; reasons why a habit is bad for you is not going to make you quit. Find an incentive and you will stand a chance. Of course this doesn’t mean you should carry on with a bad habit until an incentive presents itself. You should always be trying to give up, especially if the habit is damaging your health or well-being.

Once you’ve decided to quit your bad habit avoid telling friends and family. Especially if you’ve tried giving up before and failed. If you do feel the need to share, make sure it is someone supportive, you don’t need others to gloat if you slip up.

Take a good look at your situation and work out a strategy for dealing with it. Smokers for instance say smoking gives them something to do with their hands; by keeping their hands busy they can lessen the need to light up so often.

Everyone deals with bad habits differently; as far as solutions go one size does not fit all. Finding an incentive that will work for you is the key to correcting bad habits

Remember, you’re always too young to start a bad habit and never too old to give it up.

Bad habits keep following you wherever you go, in some form. There are many reasons for people to start practicing bad habits. There are several ways to quit this. Several researches in the past few years have rendered results.

When people researched what is the basic motivation for people to actually quit habits that are bad, it gave the answer that it is more because of emotional reasons that people have. The successful ones are the ones who wanted to quit it badly, and succeeded, those who don’t even think of it, don’t succeed.

Knowledge is best only when it is used to influence a person’s emotional balance. For instance, if a person sets up a wide network to actually help people quit smoking, he uses his mind to influence his emotions. The penalties because of the bad habits influence the emotional balance of a person that makes them want to quit.

A research was conducted on the habitual behavior of the brain. Researches tested them with rats. Rats were made to run through a maze, which had a chocolate in the other end. The rat was learning the way through the maze, and responded to all information.

After sometime, the brain responded only to the starting and the ending points. This is exactly the response that our brain gives, when our brain gets used to the bad habits. It keeps focusing on its reward.

After sometime, they removed the chocolate. Then, basal ganglia started responding to all the parts in the maze. This is exactly like quitting all the bad habits to live every moment in life.

After sometime the chocolate was put back in place, the basal ganglia started responding to the starting and ending point as before. Then, the brain again got back to the addiction, as the object was put back in place. This is exactly like the bad habits resurfacing.

A study was conducted to check the extent to which people were ready to get over the old habits and replace them with new habits. This test was conducted by testing using word tests and memorization. The research checked if the people learnt new associations after grasping similar associations first.

The test was concluded, and the results were interesting. The habits that were learnt first were below the level of consciousness, and more automatic. Stress made people revert back to old habits.

There was a study related to risky behavior, and what people think about it. This survey was conducted in several parts of Canada to learn what the most dangerous thing to do was. Most of the people actually accepted that overeating, smoking and drinking were all considered most dangerous. The health habits were the most risky habits other than the thoughtless behavior.

It is really important to learn how to react and tackle bad habits. The more information one knows, greater are the chances for them to learn the ways to get over them. With all the research being put in, the bad habits might be kicked out of the system pretty soon.

Are you suffering from any of the following habits: Overeating, Smoking, Alcohol, Procrastination, Losing your temper, Being a workaholic, Being late always, Negative thinking always. And are you fed up of trying to get over these habits with no success at all?

Then this article is for you. Keep on reading and discover an easy way to Change Bad Habits. Bad Habits are behavioral pattern that are repeatedly performed, which is affecting your growth in life or your health negatively. These patterns are acquired at some point in your life due to negligence or emotional issues. Once acquired, they are repeated during your life time and there comes a point when you cannot get out of this addiction.

Do not worry too much as you are not alone in having to Break or Change Bad Habits as the majority of the population in the world is addicted to one or more of the above repeated behavioral patterns. In the good old days Will Power was used to Break or Change Bad Habits, but to what extent was it effective is questionable. Still most of the people try to use will power or make resolutions to Break Bad Habits.

Behind what ever Bad Habit, there is always an emotional reason or past hurt involved. So without clearing this emotional issue or healing this past childhood hurt, using will power will not be effective at all in changing bad habits.

For example: take overeating, normally some one overeats in order to avoid feeling a particular emotion at that particular moment. If you dig deep and just observe your overeating habit, you may find that, you eat more in order to avoid feeling lonely, frustration, anger or some other feeling, which is the real reason behind overeating.

This being the case, however much you try to Break or Change Bad Habits using will power or resolutions will not succeed, until you address this underlying emotion first. Just feel the emotion fully and it will lose its power over you.

The easiest way to Break or Change Bad Habits is to keep your mind always relaxed. The more you can keep your mind quiet or without the mental chatter, the more you can have a relaxed and calm mind. Maintaining this state of mind is the best way to change or drop bad habits. When your mind is quiet and calm, you will never have anxiety or stress and when you do not have anxiety and stress, you automatically drop or changes bad habits. This may not happen overnight but with some practice it is definitely possible.

The most effective method to quiet your mind is to use brainwave entrainment technology. When your brainwaves are in Alpha and below, your mind is in a relaxed, calm state. Brainwave entrainment technology induces these Alpha and below brain waves and makes your mind calm and quiet.

The most effective brainwave entrainment program on earth today is the Brainev technology. The Latest Patent Pending Cutting Edge Technology known as 3-DEAP in Brainev makes it much superior to the other products out there.

Bad Habits control your life. They can turn you into a failure at work, school, also relationship. It is very essential to tackle this issue before it is too late. Self help books are best. A few are given below.

The Twelve Bad Habits That Hold Good People Back: Overcoming the Behavior Patterns That Keep You From Getting Ahead by Waldroop and Butler. Focal point of this book is workplace bad habits . It tells how to identify your own bad habits. It also teaches new ways to connect people. They imply that doing this will guide you to go ahead and flourish in your career.

A book on all habits jointly authored by James Claiborne, Ph.D. & Cherry Pedrick, R.N. It is titled Habit Change workbook: How to Overcome Bad Habits & Form Good Ones. The book shows a related-behavioral method to bad habits. Psychological principles are used to get to the base of bad habits. Then, steps are given in details to overcome them. It also gives details of a group of people having bad habits and how each one is overpowering them.

What to Do when you don’t know what to do :Bad Habits & Addictions. This is a short book by Henry Cloud & John Townsend offering a religious viewpoint to those who feel overpowered by their faults. It advices on how to overcome the addictions.

One book is some what heavy understanding on the topic of addictions. However, it gives some sound psychological advice. Changing for Good: A Revolutionary Six-Stage Program for Overcoming Bad Habits and Moving Your Life Positively Forward. Book is co-authored by James O. Prochaska, John Norcross, & Carlo DiClemente. This book is a serious reading. The authors worked together to compile a system of dealing with undesirable behaviors involving six steps, discussed in detail.

If your child needs assistance, the book titled Good kids, Bad Habits: The Real Age Guide to bringing up Healthy Children may help. In this book, the author Jennifer Tratchenberg discusses children’s various habits as they grow up. She perceives as to how these habits can pursue them in life later. Then, the writer also guides the parents to start a plan that is designed particularly for their child. This might help the child to overcome bad habits.

Of course, only an “Idiot’s Guide?” can conclude a subject properly and author Suzanne LeVert has turned up a Complete Idiot’s Guide to overcome Bad Habits. This is a book wonderful introduction on bad habits. Simultaneously, it is done with a sense of wittiness and sincerity.Scanning this book may not assist you to overcome bad habit. However, it will definitely put you in the proper mood to do it.

Books of self help are very practical tools for overcoming bad habits. They also help those used to comprehend the problem and find how to expel them. It is always better to go in for another opinion. Reading books like these on bad habits can offer you tips that would never even occur to you otherwise.

Habits are automatic responses to certain stimuli. It is the tendency to act in a certain way when certain factors are present, the repetition of the presence of these factors causes the repetition of such actions. For example, if you have a habit of watching football, either live or on TV, so long as football is being played, all things being equal, you would watch that football match.

Also, since you already have the habit of brushing your teeth each morning you wake up, you would always brush your teeth in the morning, provided there is a morning and you wake up to see it. From the two examples above, we see that the stimuli, which are things that provoke or incite or cause actions are the football match and the morning.

Habits, though they are mainly automatic responses, they didn’t just show up. Every automatic device was first programmed before it could function automatically. In the same way, you first programmed your mind, the subconscious mind, either consciously or subconsciously, which resulted to your habits. Thoughts leads to actions; and actions, when repeated over time leads to habits. It is the repetition of certain thoughts that leads to certain actions which are the obvious revelation or dramatization of the thoughts that one was thinking, which in turn leads to the formation of habits, good or bad. Bad habits are basically fruits of repeated bad thoughts.

These bad thoughts which are the main causes of bad habits can show up in man’s unwillingness to learn. A good example is the person that refuses to stop doing an act, like smoking, after being told about the dangers he stands to suffer. If such acts are repeated over time, habits can then be formed from them.

Ignorance, which is the lack of knowledge of something is another cause of bad habits. Surprised? Some people indulge in certain acts that are bad without prior knowledge of the morals of such acts. They may have not been told that such things are wrong, thus, they continue in it and suffer the consequences.

A wrong attempt to ease pain is also a major reason behind the formation of bad habits. For some who have certain pains and lack the dynamos to manage or solve them go into stuffs like narcotics in order to ease the pains, yet it only worsens the issue, creating biological problems for them in addition to the previous one.

A wrong desire for satisfaction is another major reason behind the formation of bad habits. It is ironical that evil happens to be sweet and easier to do and stick with than good. Thus the fleeting satisfaction derived from doing evil also entices people into forming self-defeating habits. It seems a lot easier to steal $500 than to earn it, thus, some may go for the short-cut which is to steal. And when satisfaction comes into play, they could take stealing as a habit. Man has a high tendency to repeat anything that affords him satisafaction or pleasure.

Do bad habits have any adverse effects? They do and sometimes the effects could be grave and self-defeating; it could even lead to death, depending on the habit. Bad habits is one of the reasons for failure in life, breakup of relationships, sickness and stagnation in life. One of the reasons why a lot of marriages are not working today is because of the bad habits of the spouses, and so long as such bad habits perpetuates, the problems or crises in such families would persist. Look at your life now, how many times have you wished you could stop doing a particular habit which is causing you a lot of harm already? Your habits can determine your destiny or fate in life. Someone has wisely said: “Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.”

In eradicating bad habits, you must first tackle it as a problem. First you must know what the problem is, to get this, get out a book and use it put down genuine answers to certain questions that you would be asking yourself along the line. Now ask yourself these; “What are the bad habits in my life that I want to get rid of? Why do I do them? When do I do them? Where do I do them? When did I start doing them? How do I do them? What am I presently suffering or stand to suffer in the future for doing them? Am I willing to stop them? What factors must be in place before I do them, what causes it?

Now that you know what your problem is, it is half-solved. The second step is to solve it completely. Since we know that habits are programmes of the subconscious mind, it is important that the subconscious mind be reprogrammed in order to get over bad habits. To do that, on that same book, write out all the opposite things in relation to your bad habits that are good – good habits that you want to start exhibiting rather that the bad ones, which would kick out the bad ones and then say those things to yourself everyday, standing in front of a mirror. Or for faster results, make it three times daily.

Solve your problem! Every bad habit is linked with a deficiency or weakness in one’s life. Discover what your problem really is and solve it. After doing these, you just have few weeks, depending on your desperation for your freedom from your bad habits, all of it, to get out of your subconscious mind and out of your life completely. Apply these steps and you must see changes, positive ones in your life in relation to your bad habits. I see you being free from your bad habits in few weeks time.