How To Adopt Good Habits and Break Bad Ones

Habits are repetitive routines or behaviours that become almost automatic or second nature to an individual after some time. This is great news for healthy habits but not so much for undesirable habits.

Healthy habits such as flossing your teeth or drinking more water can have positive physical, emotional and psychological effects on an individual.

Whilst bad habits, such as slouching or procrastinating, can damage the human body and mind, causing premature ageing, back pains and loss of motivation.

It takes, on average, 59 days for a person to form a new habit and between 30 and 60 days to break an old habit. However, both of these can be challenging as the brain doesn’t recognise which are good and bad habits.

65% of Americans developed healthy habits during the Covid-19 pandemic, which they plan to keep up, including frequent hand-washing and eating more home-cooked meals. Whilst 61% are trying to break unhealthy habits they picked up during the lockdown, such as drinking too much alcohol or having too much screen time.

(Image Source: ValuePenguin)

So, here we learn how to adopt and keep up with healthy habits and how to break the cycle of bad habits.

How to Adopt New Habits

Only 28% of people who made New Year’s resolutions at the end of 2021 say they kept all of them. This is because most people can’t get into the habit or routine of their desired resolution, such as going to the gym or drinking more water.

Here are some ways you can ‘trick’ your mind into adopting new habits:

Habit stacking

Habit stacking is when a person pairs a new habit, such as spending half an hour away from your mobile phone, with a habit that is already established, such as watching Emmerdale every weeknight.

With practice, the established routine becomes a trigger for the new habit you want to embrace, and eventually, it will become automatic.

Here are six examples of habit stacking:

• When washing the dishes after dinner, wipe down the dining table.
• When you wash your face in the evening, floss your teeth.
• When you log onto your computer for work in the morning, drink a glass of water.
• When the kettle is boiling for your morning coffee or tea, sweep the kitchen floor.
• When you watch the evening news or your favourite soap, put away your phone for 30 minutes.
• When you get into bed, complete an online Duolingo lesson to learn a new language.

Habit trackers

Habit tracking is when you log all the times you behaved in a desired way, such as flossing your teeth or completing a Duolingo language lesson. Tracking these repeated behaviours can increase the likelihood of them becoming established as habits.

Additionally, having a streak will motivate you, and it will almost become a self-competition to complete your desired habit each day so you can tick it off on your chosen habit tracker.

Habit tracking is also an ideal way to detect patterns in when you have met your goals and when you haven’t, such as noticing that you forget to floss your teeth on weekends when you stay up later.

Once you have spotted a pattern, you can develop new strategies to embed the behaviour, such as setting reminders on your phone or using habit stacking to pair washing your face with flossing your teeth.

Here are six habit tracking apps:

• Everyday offers an overview of your goals and streaks on a colourful board.
• Disciplina reminds you about your desired habits, motivates you with streaks and monitors your performance with charts and statistics.
• Habit Tracker will help you build good habits and reach your goals.
• Habitty can help you keep organised by showing and notifying you when you need to do something important.
• Avocation is a pocket assistant that will accompany you as you reach your new habit targets.
• Streaks can track up to 24 tasks on a to-do list which helps you adopt good habits.

(Image Source: Dr Alex Young’s blog)

How to Break Break Bad Habits

If you want to break a bad habit, you should replace the unwanted behaviour with an alternative and beneficial activity. This could mean sweeping the kitchen floor instead of going outside for a cigarette.

You should also remove any triggers. So using the example above, don’t have cigarettes in your house or handbag if you are trying to quit.

Here are some ways to guide you as you begin breaking the cycle:

Self-directed neuroplasticity

Self-directed neuroplasticity is a science-based method to break undesirable habits and create new, healthy ones.

Individuals can intentionally rewire their brain activities and strengthen neural connections through actions and thoughts. This highlights the importance of your everyday mindset and habits.

Here are three helpful neuroplasticity exercises:

• Trying something new is a great way to get out of your comfort zone, as being too regimented can stop you from opening up your mind, engaging the power of your prefrontal cortex (the most evolved brain region), and creating new brain pathways.
• Daily exercise, particularly cardiovascular exercise, can increase brain volume and create new neural pathways by expanding the volume of our hippocampus (the memory and navigation brain region).
• Meditation is known to reduce anxiety and stress, so it can rewire your brain to teach you to deal with stress more healthily. Start your day off with 15 minutes of meditation and try to make it a consistent practice in your life.

Habit trackers

Habit trackers can also work for the undesirable habits you want to stop, and you can choose whether to monitor your habit through a streak of shame or avoidance.

For example, if you want to stop staying up so late, you can track the bad habit itself - ‘stayed up late’ - or track the avoidance of the habit - ‘went to bed early’.

I recommend using the streak of avoidance method as it changes your bad habit into a positive one you want to develop or keep up. You can use habit trackers, some of which are mentioned above, to monitor the healthy habit of going to bed early.

Another advantage of tracking the avoidance of bad habits is that you aren’t left with the illusion that you are doing great if you forget to track your habit.

(Image Source: Dr Alex Young’s blog)

Conclusion

Harmless bad habits, like biting your nails or playing with your hair, still become hard to stop in the long run, so try to break the cycle anyway, even if they aren’t causing any harm at first.

Although breaking bad habits at first is hard, you will make your life better long-term by focusing on and replacing them with good habits.

Developing new, healthy habits is an integral part of personal growth, but it is essential to give yourself time. Soon enough, your new habits will become second nature in your daily life, and they may even feel as natural as your old habits.

Rewarding yourself is also an important part of habit formation. For example, weight loss from exercise will not appear immediately, but you can treat yourself by listening to your favourite artists while running or organising group runs, so the reward is time with a friend.