How Do You Change and/or Break Habits?
Habits take time and effort to make, change, and break
Breaking and/or changing a habit frequently requires a lot of conscious effort.
When it comes to habits and changing or breaking them – the quick fix nearly always fails. Why? Because habits are complex, multifaceted, and it takes time to build your habit in the first place.
You don’t instantly form a habit. That’s not how habits are made.
Habits form via repetition. To create a habit, you need to consciously repeat said habit over and over – until it becomes subconscious.
It can take days, weeks, months, and even years to form a habit.
And that’s when you do it actively. You can also form a habit passively.
Consciously acting to change or break habits requires mindfulness.
Action is effort
When you seek to change or break a habit, there’s always a why. There’s a reason behind the desire to expend the effort to make the change.
Identifying the why provides the impetus to expend the effort to change and/or break habits.
This is where the intention and action part of mindfulness comes in. You must have an intention to change and/or break a habit. And then take action and act upon it.
To gain that conscious awareness, you just need to recognize what you’re thinking, what and how you’re feeling, what intentions you have, and the actions you are or aren’t doing.
Identifying what you’re thinking, plus what and how you’re feeling, is how you can become consciously aware of anything and everything in your subconscious. Your beliefs, your values, and your habits, too.
But if you desire to change or break them – now you need to employ mindfulness of your intentions and actions.
The work of breaking and/or changing habits
Self-awareness of habits is the first step. Then you need to recognize and acknowledge them. Next, you need conscious awareness – mindfulness – of the habit. Specifically, what it is, what triggers it, how it impacts you, and other important details related to it. With that, you can now set the intention and take the action to break and/or change a given habit.
It takes perseverance to change, break, and/or build new habits. Recognizing and acknowledging that it’s seldom easy makes it less difficult to roll with the punches and handle the unexpected along the way.
This week’s Applied Guidance for Mindfulness Tool:
Identifying specific habits can help you better know yourself and be more self-aware as such. Whether you desire to change and/or break a habit – or not – knowing your habits can be useful.
Identifying a habit takes mindfulness.
This is one way to do this process in steps.
1. Pick a time to be alone and uninterrupted for 5 minutes.
2. Spend 1-2 minutes breathing deeply to center and focus.
3. Think about things you do by rote and routine. These can be big or small.
a. This might include things like brushing your teeth, drinking coffee, chewing your fingernails, smoking, journaling, writing what you’re grateful for, and lots more.
4. Write down what you come up with.
5. Make a note of if you think the habit is good, bad, or neutral.
In this way, you can get a clear picture of your habits.
You might desire to do this a few times to really get a thorough handle on what habits you have. If you find you dislike or desire to change a habit – identifying it is the first step to that.
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