Breaking bad habits

There are a few bad habits I am trying to break and I have been trying to break them for years now. I am sure I am not alone in this.

One of my bad habits is snacking outside of meal times or eating while I prepare food for my family. Even when it is healthy food I am nibbling on, it does not change the fact that it is a bad habit I want to break. I eat when I am not hungry and then when it is time to sit down with my family, I have no appetite. This spoils the fun to sit around a table and to enjoy a meal together as a family. And due to the lack of my self-control, as soon as there is something that might have the slightest resemblance to chocolate in the house, it will soon disappear in my mouth without me even mindfully enjoying it. 

So how do we tackle this thing of breaking bad habits? A book named Switched by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, discusses a study done on self-control. The researchers came to the conclusion that there is a limit to a person’s self-control. You can only make a certain amount of conscious decisions a day that takes self-control before your self-control runs out and the temptation will win. Therefore we shouldn’t try to break all 10 bad habits in one week. Choose only one. Don’t make it impossible. Choose to use your self-control wisely so that you don’t have to consciously battle temptations the entire time. In my case, I try not to buy unhealthy food at all and if there is unhealthy food in the house I try to hide it out of eyesight. 

In a book written by DR Caroline Leaf, Switch On Your Brain, she speaks about building new pathways. Think about your beautiful green lawn. The shortest path between your car and your front door is straight through the middle of the lawn. If you walk this path every day soon the grass will wither and a natural footpath will form. If you now decide to walk a different route to your door, it will take a long time every day to take exactly the same route for a new pathway to form and for the old one to disappear. The same happens with bad habits. Those pathways are so imprinted in our brains; it takes active and conscious decision-making to change it. It is not as easy as just replacing a bad habit with a good one. But the good news is, if we stick to our new habit for long enough, it will become our brains new pathway, a new normal and you won’t have to constantly battle with it anymore.

Dr Leaf also reports that it takes the brain 21 days times three cycles to build new pathways. A trick that helped me to stay focussed is drawing a table of 3 x21 days. Then every day I successfully replaced my bad habit with a good one, I get to tick my box of success. 

With this all said, I must confess I am not a guru in changing bad habits. The irony is while I am writing this blog I am munching away on popcorn. I still have some pathways to change.

Good luck and enjoy your new healthy habits.

Please share what bad habits you want to replace with good ones. We definitely need one another’s support.