How To Overcome Bad Habits

Habits are often regular behaviour practice that grows stronger in due course. Habits ingrained so in psychic that it becomes part of life and are very hard to give up. Habits are meant to get the regular task done in less time without investing time in the thinking process. If it is not an automatic behavioral pattern lodged in the unconscious mind, it would not be easy to achieve more when you need to apply your mind thinking about everything you do.

There is nothing wrong with good habits, but the problem is only with the habits that are considered bad and because of that you want to get rid of it. Bad habits are developed unconsciously or consciously by mistake, but you have to break it sometimes to lead a disciplined life. Although it is difficult to break the bad habit, but if you have an unwavering will and put in a conscious effort to re-train your mind, you would be able to get over it. Here are few tips that you will find it useful to overcome bad habits:

1) PUNISH YOURSELF

Sometimes a little bit of punishment discourages a person from doing what they unconsciously do as a bad habit. Here punishment does not mean to torture yourself unnecessary and invite new troubles for you. Suppose if you tend to shake your leg, you should pinch yourself hard the moment you notice it. It would definitely hurt you, but very soon your brain learns to recognize the pain in relation to shaking your leg and over the period of time you stopped shaking your leg because of pain associated with it, your subconscious mind does not allow it to happen.

2) FORM A NEW HABIT

To overcome a bad habit, you can form a new habit opposite to the bad ones. If you used to sit sluggishly, then you should force yourself to sit keeping your back straight at least for 30 days. As a rule of thumb, new habits get at least 30 days to develop provided you keep repeating the same thing regularly. So the most effective way to stop doing bad habit is to replace it with good ones. In other word, new habits wipes out the bad ones and you need to form a new habit to replace each bad one.

3) KEEP OCCUPIED YOURSELF

When a person is totally occupied in a work or some kind of sports, they do not do things what they usually do as a habit because being occupied in something grabs the whole attention of a person. If you do not do whatever you used to do over a period of time due to your dedicated, focused attention of some other things, you would get rid of bad habits over a period of time.

4) REWARD YOURSELF

Giving yourself reward for not repeating the bad habit in a day or week motivate you the most and give you a sense of accomplishment. So to overcome bad habits, you should encourage your level of motivation by giving yourself some kind of reward. If you are motivated enough to make a conscious effort to not repeat you bad habit for a longer period of time, then it would become the habit of the past.

5) CONSULT THERAPIST

When the bad habit is related to some kind of addiction like smoking, drinking and you want to get over it, then you should consult a therapist to get a professional help. Most of the people often develop these kinds of bad habits themselves out of curiosity that they regret it later. Now days, there is no stigma attached with it if you go to see the specialized doctor to get rid of your bad addiction.

Hence, getting rid of bad habits is something hard and the worst thing is that they are likely to be back at any time if you do not force yourself to not do over a period of time until not doing it become a new form of habit. Habits are meant to make your life easy; not to bring new trouble for you. Bad habits are detrimental to your wellbeing and society at large. So if you want to have no regrets in life due to your bad habits, you should make an effort to overcome it at the earliest.