How hard is it for you to break a bad habit?

            How hard is it for you to break a bad habit? No matter how disciplined we are, 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 and 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 most self-defeating habits center around the way we mis-manage food and money. If we target these two areas first, we change other habits a bit more easily.

To bring about a change in our bad habits, Baili 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, list things you do to ruin it all and sabotage your goals, and list actions or behaviors you might choose instead. Follow my diagram below:

1. Problem Area: Food

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

2. Problem Area: Money

Goals	How I self-sabotage	What I will do instead

3. Problem Area: Starting Arguments

Goals	How I self-sabotage	What I will do instead

We all self-sabotage from time to time.  When you find yourself entertaining negative thoughts that might sabotage your progress, stop those thoughts immediately. Catching ourselves in the act of misbehaving and doing something immediately to stop our negative routine is the key to success. Negative thinking leads to more negative behavior, which causes us to sabotage our progress. Breaking bad habits takes practice, persistence and patience, but bad habits can be changed one day at a time.
(c) M.D. Johnson (2013)