Breaking Bad Habits

Your life gets interrupted by the presence of a BAD HABIT, and this can prevent us from achieving our set goals. A bad habit also messes with our health, both physically and mentally. Finally, they waste your time and conserved energy. Your life today, is the sum total of your habits. Your habits will determine how far you will go in life, how you will end up and how happy or unhappy you would be in life. So it is better to guard you life from bad habits that could mar your development and progression in life.

Habits are defined as what we repeatedly do i.e. what we spend our time doing each day or thinking about. They ultimately mould who we become, what we believe and our personality. Habits are being developed at some point in our lives; they don’t just come out of the blues.

Though, some habits are good and helpful like waking up every morning to pray. Other habits are harmful and they work against us (both short-term and long-term effects). The truth is that, we all have a bad habit or two that we have to break. For some, it is taking too much chocolaty things, too much smoking and alcoholic intakes, staying too much on the internet, too much television madness, and many more habits that we may not realize are Bad Habits.

The question now, why do we still indulge in them? Also, is there anything we can do to break out of them? Fortunately, we can eliminate a habit which has a negative effect on us; we just need to have a step by step plan of action.

Let us first of all get to know how these habits begin: 

• Some habits could be a result of boredom.
• Some could be from peer pressure.
• Some could be what we learn on the media (television programmes, social media, and magazines e.t.c)
• Some could be as a result of frustration: there’s a post on how to eliminate the frustration barrier.
• Some could be as a result of a trauma we once experienced.
• Some could begin as a result of what we are being taught wrongly, and many other reasons.

How to personally put these bad habits under check:

• First, we have to plan for the ‘Habit change’.
• Understand what, who or how these habits are triggered. The more knowledge you have about a habit, the easier it is to eliminate it.
• Focus on one habit at a time. You can’t change all at once.
• Punish yourself each time you commit “the offense” in a week and reward yourself if you have been truthful to your change plan in the week.
• Don’t try to stop all at once, take it a step at a time.
• Commit yourself to support group or share it with someone more experienced than you are that you can trust.
• Study helpful articles on how to break those habits.
• Constantly review yourself.
• Replicate the bad habit with a positive one. (I was once an alcohol addict, my favourite brand was red wine. I had to stop it by first emptying a bottle of red wine and replace its content with pepsi. I did this till I began to enjoy pepsi more than red wine).
• Avoid visiting places where you know you are more vulnerable to the bad habit; for instance, if you want to stop taking alcohol or cigarette, you’d need to avoid going to bars, beer-parlors, pubs, etc.
• Have a visible note of your ‘Habit Change’ on every strategic place you mostly go in your apartment. Read it to yourself every time you come across it. You can even put it as a reminder on your phone and set it to ring out every hour.
• Make a public declaration about your Habit Change to your friends.
• Find an Accountability Partner.
• Do everything possible to live a healthy life and remain positive.

Finally, breaking bad habit is a journey that doesn’t have a destination. You have to constantly do your best to avoid these bad habits. Even when the habits are all gone, you have to avoid a U-turn.  Real results come from you taking actions, not just writing down your action plans. I would recommend you print out this article if you find it helpful and read it to yourself every time.

If you fail while on the process, don’t worry, keep doing your best and you’d eventually get it. Changing bad habits requires a daily commitment. Work hard and stay focused. Learn from your mistakes and work your way to the top.

You can quickly make this prayer in your heart:

Father, I pray that You grant me the grace to stay strong and I pray that when the opportunity to commit any bad habit comes, let the temptation to do it be far from me and when the temptation to do it comes, let the opportunity to commit it be far from me, in Jesus Name I pray.