Bad habits will ruin your life. Everyone knows it. But many are not able to overcome. The good news is bad habits can be changed, for that you must understand how they work. Habits work on a neurological level and it’s automatic. Once you feel triggered, then automatically you do a routine and will get the reward. This is how habits work. Whether it is alcoholism, smoking, pornography (sexual addictions), drug addiction, snacking, or any other bad habits: It’s all works in this way. Your old deep habits can be overridden by new patterns in your nervous system. 40% of actions people do each day are not actual decisions, but habits. In this article, I am going to share some practical ideas for changing bad habits like smoking, alcohol, sexual addiction, and snacking.
How do habits work?
Your brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort. Your brain will try to make almost any routine into a habit. Anything that you do repeatedly over time, will become a habit. First, there is a tiger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode. This process within your brain is a three-step loop. Then it chooses a routine, which can be physical, mental, or emotional. Finally, there is a reward. During the rewarding process, the brain releases most of the happy hormones like Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin, and Endorphins in some amount depending on the routine. Now you would understand why habits are nearly effortless routine.
The Golden Rule of Habit Change
You cannot truly extinguish bad habits. To change a habit, you must keep the old trigger and the old reward. But Insert a new routine. That’s the rule. If you use the same cue and provide the same reward, you can shift the routine and change the habit. almost any bad behavior can be transformed if the cue and reward stay the same.
This Golden rule has influenced treatments of alcoholism, weight loss, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and hundreds of other destructive bad habits. Understanding it can help you to change your own habits. Attempts to give up snacking, for instance, will often fail unless there is a new routine to satisfy old triggers and get a similar reward. A smoker usually cannot quit unless finding some activity to replace cigarettes when a nicotine craving is triggered.
You must make a self-analysis and figure out all the things that trigger a particular habit. For example, alcoholics crave a drink because it offers escape, relaxation, companionship, subdues anxieties, and an opportunity for emotional release. They crave a cocktail to forget their worries.
The Power of God
If habit replacement is so effective, you may seem to fail at some critical moments in your life. Replacement habits become durable only when new behaviors when are accompanied by something else.
Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), is one of the largest, most well-known, and successful habit-changing organizations in the world. Researchers interviewed those who got success in AA. All of them said the same thing: Identifying triggers and choosing new routines is important, but without another ingredient, the new habits never fully took stronghold.
The secret, the alcoholics said, was God.
Researchers hated the explanation. God and spirituality are not testable hypotheses. Churches are filled with drunks who continue to drink despite a deep faith. What those alcoholics believed is some higher power had entered their lives is make it through the stressful periods with their sobriety intact. Trusting in God and promises in the bible reworked habit loop into a permanent behavior. A decision to turn your will and your lives over to the care of God as you understand him. As you start trusting in God, worries disappear.
In a 1994 Harvard study that examined people who had radically changed their lives, for instance, researchers found that some people had remade their habits after a personal tragedy, such as divorce or a life-threatening illness. Others changed after they saw a friend go through something awful.
However, there was no tragedy that preceded people’s transformations. They changed because they were embedded in social groups that made change easier. One woman said her entire life shifted when she signed up for a psychology class and met a wonderful group. When people join groups where change seems possible, the potential for that change to occur is more real. There are simply communities sometimes of just one other person – who make change believable. One woman told researchers her life transformed after a day spent cleaning toilets – and after weeks of discussing with the rest of the cleaning crew whether she should leave her husband.
“Change occurs among other people”, one of the psychologists involved in the study. “It seems real when we can see it in other people’s eyes. AA so effective – the power of a group to teach individuals how to believe – happens whenever people come together to help one another change. Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.
For a habit to change, you must believe change is possible. Most often, that belief only emerges with the help of a group.
If you want to quit smoking, figure out a different routine that will satisfy the cravings filled by cigarettes. Then, find a support group, a collection of other former smokers, or a community that will help you believe you can stay away from nicotine, and use that group when you feel you might stumble. Belief is essential, and it grows out of the communal experience, even if that community is only as large as two people.
Researchers on Dieting say creating new food habits requires predetermined triggers such as planning menus in advance and simple rewards for dieters when they stick to their intentions.
What I have shared in this blog is from the book, ” The Power of Habit, why do we do what we do and how to change”, by Charles Duhingg.
Avoiding triggers within your ability makes overcoming any bad habits easier. It is important to note that the process of habit change is easily described, but it does not necessarily follow that it is easily accomplished. Changing any habit requires determination. No one will quit smoking cigarettes simply because they ketch a habit loop.
Diet and Lifestyle plays important role in good and bad triggers. Refined sugar-based food products like chocolates and sugar drinks, Caffeine based drinks like Tea and Coffee, meat-based food products, spicy food Tiggers many bad habits. Plant-based palatable and good seasoned food makes your brain calm and composed of good things in the mind.
Exercise like simple walking for 20 to 30 min a day, Sleeping early before 10 PM regularly, Brushing teeth daily, Taking a bath every day, etc. plays important role in suppressing triggers that leads to bad habits.
Constipation plays important role in triggering bad habits. It affects sleep, causes irritation easily, makes anyone not able to focus. Fiber-rich plant-based diet is important to keep your colon clean.
To come out of sexual addictions finding out what triggers is important. For men drinking mint tea, non-GMO soy milk, flaxseed helps to reduce libido. For women Oats meal without dairy milk helps to reduce libido.
All dairy products contain hormones. Following a dairy-free lifestyle is important for a healthy lifestyle and overcoming addictions.
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