Breaking bad habits is a monster!

Breaking bad habits is a monster--best tamed one day at a time!

            Bad habits are hard to break because the brain chooses what it’s been accustomed to. If it has been accustomed to negative thinking or negative habits, it tries to make sure we get what we prefer, or at least, what it thinks we prefer. Because of the brain’s tendency toward negative thinking, negative thinking takes longer to change, and because changes don’t come easily, sometimes we give up or sabotage our progress toward happiness.

In the article, “Prescriptions for Life: How to attain your goals, great and small, and create a life you love,” Susan Baili highlights a few things that we do to sabotage our progress toward being wholesome, happy human beings. (Susan Biali, M.D., Psychology Today, August 3, 2011). Then she offers the following tips on how to stop this negative behavior:

1) Admitting to yourself what you're doing, and when you're doing it.

In other words, keep track of what you’re doing, when you tend to do it, and what causes you to do it. She explains that two of  our most self-defeating habits center around the way we manage food and money.  Because many of our problems stem from mismanaging these two things.

To bring about a change in our habits, she suggests that we set goals and put them in writing. In a notebook of 8 1/2 X 11 paper, list goals for each problem area. (For every problem area, use a separate sheet of paper.) Save room at the bottom for commentary.Take, for example, goals around food and money. On a separate page for each problem area, list goals around food and money. Follow my chart (not Biali's) below:

 Problem Area: Food

Goals	Way(s) that I sabotage	Behavior to use instead

Questions, Answers, Commentary:

2. Problem Area: Money

Goals	How I self-sabotage	What I will do instead

 Questions, Answers, Commentary: