How Do You Change Your Habits?

Learn about your habits:

When you are anxious, tired, or under stress, you are more likely to resort to ordinary patterns of thinking and behavior. However, they are habits that will not serve your purpose or help you build the life you desire.

Your brain favors habits, so it does not have to make an effort. Even negative habits are more comfortable than new ones. So, once you begin to recognize these patterns, you can make voluntary choices about the habits you want to maintain and adopt. This is what Anne Grady's book "Mind Over Moment" is based on.

Habit is something that once required a conscious effort, but it is now automatic. It turns out that a large portion of what you do every day - over 45% - is just a habit. Your brain uses these cognitive shortcuts to save energy. If you have ever driven home unconsciously because you were immersed in thought, you did it out of habit.

You live about half your life without conscious thought of your actions. If you are not careful, you can become a slave to your habits, and these habits become a way to live your life unconsciously instead of deliberately choosing what you want and finding a way to get there.

Habits can be very helpful. After all, if you have to think twice about wearing shoes, eating, showering, or getting dressed, you'll feel exhausted by nine in the morning. Your habits allow you to maintain your mental energy.

For example, Have you ever gone to the grocery store after they rearranged the shelves, and wondered where they put the peanut butter? Searching for items that you used to know their place is very stressful after they've been relocated.

Without even realizing it when you plan to go to the store, you imagine what you need from each suite because you know exactly where things are. Your brain has a map. It's actually a neural network that gets imprinted in a deeper way every time you do or think about the same thing. That makes it easier for you to think or do things that you've constantly thought about and done.

Unfortunately, your brain doesn't distinguish a good habit from a bad one. It doesn't recognize the difference between your stress, anxiety, fear, or optimism, enthusiasm, and gratitude. Also, it doesn't distinguish coming back from work from going to the gym. Your brain takes anything you think, say, or do repetitively and turns it into a habit.

Practice your habits in a thoughtful way:

Take a second of your time to try the following:

• Cross your arms as if you are cold or angry.
• Now cross them in the opposite direction.

Which way made you feel weirder? The first time you crossed your arms, you received the signal from the limbic system. It's a habit because you did it too much without thinking. The second time you crossed your arms in the opposite direction, the signal came from the frontal lobe cortex. So, maybe it seemed a little weird and uncomfortable, and you had to think about it. If you practice holding your arms in that direction regularly, this will also become a habit eventually.

Building resilience requires that you put your habits into practice in a thoughtful way. This means that you have to challenge your automatic thoughts and behaviors. This is hard work. When it comes to your life personally and professionally, you have to think about the habits that support your success and that hinder it.

There is no timetable for changing habits. They are deeply embedded in your neural pathways. It takes frequent and regular change to build new ones. Just because you develop a new neural pathway doesn't mean erasing the old one. So, it is easy to fall back into old habits.

Think of your mind as a field full of grass. You can walk across the field, but the grass will reappear. You may have to walk in the same place a hundred times before the path straightens. Also, just because you open new paths does not mean that the old ones are worn out or uncomfortable. The old, rugged paths you know may be more comfortable than the flat ones you don't know. So, you have to be prepared to adapt in uncomfortable circumstances to change your habits patterns. 

Changing mental habits:

If you let your mind wander on its own, you are more likely to overthink about the negatives. You will criticize yourself, question your decisions, and regret the things you said or didn't say, and the things you could have done but didn't do.

You can spend all day in regret if you aren't careful. It can become a habit and you have to work on changing it. Practicing upholding the power of the mind means being in control of yourself when something happens and making a conscious decision of what you should do.

Unfortunately, you can't get rid of a habit. However, you can replace sterile thoughts with more productive ones. Ultimate positive thoughts are not meant here at all. Your mind cannot quickly go from regretting something you said to being overjoyed for saying it. However, it can move from a negative thought to a realistic one, like moving from that state of regret to accepting what happened and getting over it.

It is not easy, and it requires a lot of resolution. Do not try to change more than one habit at the same time. This is an absolute way to fail. Think about your New Year's resolutions. You promised yourself that this year will be different, that you will eat healthy food, exercise, and reduce unhealthy drinks.

Nonetheless, by mid-January you'll have a soda in one hand, and a cheeseburger in the other. You'll go to the gym, but you will not repeat it because you feel tired. You will go back to your old behavior.

Combining habits to adopt a new behavior:

In his book "Habit Stacking", author S.J. Scott introduces the concept of combining habits to help you adopt a new behavior. Given the difficulty of developing new habits, he suggests "piling" a new habit on an existing one. For example, you brush your teeth twice a day. If you are trying to develop the habit of practicing gratitude, choose a time to do it either before or right after brushing your teeth. Then think of three specific things that you are grateful for. Like being grateful because:

• Your family and friends are in good health.
• You have enough food and water, and you have a beautiful home.
• The weather is nice and you can go out for a walk this morning.

Adding a new habit to an existing one makes it easier to stick to it.

In conclusion:

Behavior change occurs in one of three ways: rarely, slowly, or not at all. What changes the habit is not the big changes you make at once. It is the simple things that you do repeatedly that create new behaviors and patterns of thinking over time.