Bad habits can be hard to break. Just like good habits, you do them unconsciously, and that’s the reason why it would be difficult to break and change them. But it doesn’t mean that it would be impossible. But of course, you have to do it the right way.
Diane Dreher provides us five tips based on neuroscience research that will help us break bad habits successfully. Here is the first one:
Build Awareness and Take Control. Habits are unconscious. The first step in breaking a bad habit is bringing it into conscious awareness. We can do this by consciously keeping score. My friend Bob had smoked cigarettes for 20 years. When he wanted to break this habit, he took out an index card, wrote down the date, and made a checkmark for each cigarette he smoked that day. Just by becoming aware, he decreased the number of cigarettes he smoked per day. In one month, he went down from two packs a day to one. Then he took charge, cutting down from smoking 20 cigarettes a day one week, to 19 a day the next, progressively smoking less and less until he finally quit completely.
Check out the other tips over at Psychology Today.
What bad habits were you able to break in the past?
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