How
To Change Your Bad Habits - The Easiest Way Lesson From Charles Duhigg Book “The
Power of Habit”
One
of the bad habits I had back in a day was spending hours and hours on Facebook
I was an avid user during my teenage years. When the platform first came out it
was the best way to socialize with your friends and plan events but the reason
why I spent so much time on the platform wasn't because I was talking to my
friends or organizing a party it was because of the news-feed. The news-feed is
designed to put you into a sort of trance because well Facebook wants you to
spend more time on their platform and it worked like a charm. I was easily
spending one two and sometimes even three hours every single day. Mindlessly
scrolling down and down and down watching pointless videos being bombarded with
ads to buy stuff and worst of all looking at the supposedly better lives of
people that I kind of knew so later on when I discovered the world of
self-development I realized that I had to get rid of this bad habit but I
didn't want to delete Facebook altogether how else was I gonna chat with my
friends or get invited to do fun things and that's when I realized that I needed
to change the environment within Facebook so I decided to download a plugin
called news-feed Eradicator.
Which
like the name suggests gets rid of your news-feed and instantaneously I saw a
change I went from spending two to three hours a day on Facebook to spending
less than 10 minutes all in the course of just one day with only the 5 minutes
it took for me to install that plug-in and I had no cravings for it whatsoever it
almost felt like I forgot that the news-feed ever existed what I learned from
that experience was just how powerful changing your environment can be in fact
it is without a doubt the easiest way to change your habits but you'll want to
pay close attention to two things when changing your environment number one you
want to increase and decrease certain cues in your environment we talked about
cues.
It's
what starts the whole process in the case of my bad Facebook habit the cue was
the news-feed simply seeing the news-feed made me want to scroll down so by
getting rid of this cue completely it became almost impossible for my bad habit
to even begin I basically forgot about the news-feed on the other hand you
should increase the queues for good habits in your life.
A couple
of months ago I moved into a new office and decided to install a pull-up bar
under one of the main doors and just by having that bar there I found myself doing
an additional 10 to 20 pull-ups a day without even thinking about it because
every time my walked under the door I was confronted
with the cue for my pull-up habit which is being under a pull-up bar the second thing you want to keep in mind when it comes to
changing your environment is you want to make it harder to follow through with
your bad habits and easier to follow through with your good habits.
What
I mean by this well there are certain habits with cues are unavoidable let's
say you're a bit overweight and part of it is because you snack on junk food a
lot looking at this habit you can't really get rid of the cue here because the
cue is hunger but what you can do is throw out all of the junk food in your
house and then stock your fridge up with a bunch of healthy alternatives so
when you do feel hungry which is inevitable it becomes extremely hard for you
to snack on junk food you would have to get dressed go to the store buy it and
come back which would probably take you at least 10 to 20 minutes.
Why
do all of that when you have delicious but healthy food in the fridge which is
literally only seconds away by changing your environment like this you've made
it harder to stick to your bad habit and easier to stick to your good one or let's
say you want to make going to the gym into a habit one of the biggest factors
that will determine whether or not you actually go to the gym consistently is
how far away your gym is if it takes you an hour just to get their chances are
you're going to end up skipping out quite often the easier it is for you to
actually get to the gym the better another thing you can do is prepare all of
your gym equipment the night before gym clothes water bottle lock gym bag etc
by having all of this stuff ready and packed.
The
night before it makes it easier to follow up and it also serves as a visual cue
a packed gym bag means that you're going to the gym and here's one more
interesting trick that has actually worked extremely well for a lot of my
clients which is wearing your gym clothes to sleep this actually builds off of
an old habit of yours from your past which is gym class back when you were in
elementary or high school every time you wore your gym clothes in school you
ended up doing some sort of fitness related activity for years and years and
years and this over time has become a habit so when you wake up wearing your
gym clothes you unconsciously expect yourself to work out so that serves as a cue
as well so remember guys if you want to change your life then you need to carefully
look at the environment around you ask yourself this am I in an environment
that promotes my good habits or my bad ones and what changes can I make to my
environment that would benefit me that would make it much more likely for me to
stick to my good habits and stop doing my bad ones.
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