Changing your habits for success

When you are anxious, weary, or under time constraints, you are more prone to revert to your old ways of thinking and behavior in order to cope. But are such practices beneficial to you? Will they assist you in creating the life you desire?

Your brain likes habits because they reduce the amount of effort it has to perform. Even bad habits are more comfortable than learning new ones, according to research. Following the identification of patterns, you may make deliberate decisions about the behaviors you want to keep and which ones you want to acquire. This is the premise of my book and technique, Mind Over Moment, which is based on this principle.

A habit is something that used to take conscious effort but has now become automatic as a result of repetition. It turns out that a significant percentage of what you do each day is a result of your habits. In fact, habits account for more than 45 percent of what you do on a daily basis. In order to preserve energy, your brain is reliant on these cognitive shortcuts. In the event that you have ever driven home on autopilot because you were lost in contemplation, you were acting on the basis of habit.

You spend almost half of your time operating on autopilot. If you are not cautious, you may become a slave to your habits, and your habits can become a method for you to automatically live your life, rather than carefully deciding what you want and laying out a plan for how you will achieve it.

Habits may be really beneficial. After all, if you had to concentrate really hard to do anything as simple as putting on your shoes, eating, having a shower, or dressing, you would be fatigued by 9 a.m. Your routines assist you in preserving mental energy and staying focused.

Even if you don't realize it, when you plan your trip to the supermarket, you mentally see what you'll need in each aisle since you're familiar with the layout of the shop. Every time you think about something or do something, your brain creates a map, which is effectively a neural network that becomes more deeply inscribed. This makes it much simpler to think or act in the same ways that you have always thought or acted in the past.

Unfortunately, your brain does not distinguish between a good habit and a poor habit when it comes to habits. It cannot distinguish between being nervous, frightened, and afraid as opposed to being hopeful, exhilarated, and appreciative. It's not aware of the distinction between arriving home from work and enjoying a glass of wine or heading to the gym. Your brain just absorbs everything that you think, say, or do over and over again and changes it into a habit.

It is necessary to be conscious about your behaviors if you want to build resilience. It necessitates challenging your default beliefs and habits, which is time-consuming and difficult. When it comes to your personal and professional life, what habits are helping you to succeed and which habits are hindering your success are important to consider.

There is no set schedule for changing one's habits. Your neural pathways have been carved profoundly, and it will require repeated, continuous modification to create new neural pathways inside your brain. And just because you generate a new brain route does not imply that the old ones are deleted, which implies that it is possible to revert to old habit patterns after the new pathway is established.

As an analogy, consider your brain to be a field of greenery. Despite the fact that you can walk through the field, the grass will still grow again. Perhaps a hundred times walking in the same spot will be required to carve out an appropriate route. Moreover, just because you create new routes does not imply that the existing ones aren't still well-worn and nice to walk on. Old rocky pathways that we are familiar with might be more pleasant than new smooth paths that we are unfamiliar with. You must be willing to get comfortable with being uncomfortable if you want to modify your behavioral patterns.

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