Change your habits, change your life.
In his book, the Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg, breaks down the three step process by which habits are formed. Specifically, he identifies habit formation as a three step process whereby 1) the brain is triggered by an external or internal mechanism, 2) it automatically activates an activity (i.e. habit) which is either a physical, mental or emotional activity and 3) it receives a reward which cements that activity into a routine to be repeated in the future so that the person (i.e. you) can receive the reward again, whatever it might be.
Habits are Routines
Habits, or as Charles Duhigg calls them, routines, are everywhere and they can be anything. An example of a physical routine could be eating a cookie, a mental routine could be asking yourself “Why does this always happen to me?” and an emotional routine could be feeling frustrated at being stuck in traffic. The bottom line is that more than half of our daily activities, be they physical activities, mental activities, or emotional activities, are actually outside of our conscious control. In other words, they are habits.
"The book, Power of Habit, suggests outright that habits emerge without our permission."
Most of us feel that we are at the mercy of our habits and that our habits, for the most part, are outside our control. In fact, the book, Power of Habit, suggests outright that habits emerge without our permission. While this is true overall due to our lack of awareness regarding what a habit is, we can take back control over our habits. In fact, with practice, we can prevent habits which we do not want from ever emerging and we can actively choose which habits to cultivate in order to support our long term happiness.
Change Your Habits
In the Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg suggests that to create a new habit, simply identify a specific cue to trigger your brain, identify the activity you would like your brain to perform when it is triggered, and then reward yourself amply, over and over and over again. Voila! A new habit is formed (eventually).
Regarding how to break a bad habit, Charles Duhigg states that a bad habit cannot be extinguished but rather, must be replaced with a new habit. He states that to stop a bad habit, identify a new activity to replace the old one when the brain is triggered by the old cue, and perform that instead of the old activity. Again, reward yourself amply, over and over and over again for performing the new activity. That’s it. It’s as simple as that.
The important thing to remember is that time and repetition are your friends when it comes to installing new habits into your daily routine and breaking bad habits that bring you down. You must condition your mind to the new routine, over and over and over again, regardless of whether you are installing a new habit outright or trying to replace a bad habit with a good one.
There is a shortcut, however.
You can break your bad habits faster and accelerate your good habit creation process.
Keep reading to find out…
The Power of Emotion
A sure fire way to decrease the time it takes to break a bad habit and install a new, good habit is to increase the intensity of the reward you receive after performing that new activity. This does not mean that the actual reward has to change, per se. Rather, it’s your emotional reaction to the reward that has to intensity.
For example, let’s say that you would like to stop eating potato chips when you’re stressed and instead, you would like to start eating baby carrots. Both have the satisfying crunch you crave when you’re stressed but one is healthy while the other is not. But clearly, the potato chips carry with them a reward that the carrots do not: the addictive quality of the salt + fat + starch + crunch combination that we all know and (unfortunately) love. The carrots have the satisfying crunch, but none of the other inherent qualities that make potato chips so addictive.
So how do baby carrots become an “addiction” (another way to say “a habit”) instead of potato chips?
You can transform baby carrots into a healthy addiction by increasing the positive emotional response you experience while eating them or even while you just imagine eating them. The mind and body do not know the difference between what is real and what is imagined so you don’t even need to eat baby carrots to install a healthy addiction to baby carrots. You just need to imagine eating them and associate intensely pleasurable, intensely satisfying experiences with the act of eating baby carrots.
Habits are Associations
At their core, habits are the result of the associations our mind makes between two experiences such as the act of eating potato chips and the release of stress, or the act of thinking a habitual thought and feeling a certain way. By establishing new powerful associations between habits you want in your life and strong positive emotions you can accelerate the process of introducing good habits into your life and eliminating negative habits.
"Take back control of your mind and your habits by actively seeking positive associations with good habits that you want in your life."
Our mind is a neuroassociative machine and it is always making new associations even when we are not consciously aware of it. Take back control of your mind and your habits by actively seeking positive associations with good habits that you want in your life and install them via powerful guided meditations and self-hypnosis techniques such as the ones we teach in our office. While it would take too many words to write out the specific techniques, we do have videos that walk you through how to create your own powerful associations between habits you want in your life and positive rewards. We also teach you how to interrupt routines that keep you locked in bad habits so that you can break bad habits for good and make room for those good habits you want more of.
Search our blog or visit our YouTube channel for videos that teach you and your loved ones how to break bad habits for good and install good habits in your life. If you’d like to take action now, book an Initial Assessment below.
