Kicking Bad Habits Module

Welcome back to this final lecture about habits and how they dictate our lives and emotional happiness they give is routine and form our daily responses and behavior. So it is a very important subject to pay attention to when finding happiness. Our courses are all about actionable advice right. So in this course we talk specifically about breaking bad habits for the elite. The number one rule is Do not rely solely on willpower and do not try to go cold turkey and force yourself to break habit. It rarely works because the human brain needs gentle coaxing and persuasion to change a habit that could have built up over years and importantly something to take its place. You see it in movies especially in drug related but clinics don’t use this technique you must expect to face temptation and lapses and we tend to underestimate the power of these. So you need to understand your limits and plan and dealing with these temptations and lapses. For example as the day goes by our willpower is used up. So that’s why we tend to be more vulnerable to lapses in the evening. Like eating unhelpfully or watching too much TV because you are tired and it’s easy to fall back into these bad habits. There is actually a scientific term for this concept is called ego depletion and has been proven in numerous scientific experiments one of which was Roy Baumeister is the social psychologist whose main finding was that you have only a finite amount of willpower and it gets depleted as you use it and that you use the same amount of willpower for every different type of task. So all the things that go on in your life are depleting this store of willpower as the day goes by so you can see how precarious it is to rely solely on willpower. We are going to give you some tips to break habits in a more controlled and a more guaranteed way. First things first start with one single habit and focus on only one at a time e.g. drinking less or spending less time on Facebook. Start with why you want to break that habit. And the real emotional reasons because these have to be strong and powerful enough for there to be a change. E.g. have Facebook. People spend time on there because it’s easy and maybe they’re bored and they want entertainment. So why not use that same time on the web to watch a TED talk or learn a new skill. Number two give it at least 30 days. Now some researchers say you need more than 30 days but 30 days is enough time to build the new habit and short enough to say you can move onto the next one or tweak the process. If it’s not quite working for you. Use the coach me up for habit tracking so that you can track with the help of some technology. The 30 days progress and whether the success or failure it gives you reminders and tips to help you and you can even share progress with the community. Number three now set your goal for the habit. I want to not look at Facebook for more than one hour a day. For 25 of the next 30 days. So you are giving yourself a little bit of wiggle room because you will fall off the wagon at some point. But this goal written down sets the bar for knowing if you succeed or not one mistake or one lapse in the month does not equal failure. So give yourself the leeway and don’t demand of yourself perfection because this is often the thing that can over stress a person and causes failure when they’re trying to kick a habit because they see one lapse as a failure and then give up completely or over indulge in the bad habit. So understand that you probably will have some lapses and this is normal and it’s OK because it’s a microphone and not a sprint. We would advise using something like the Seinfeld Calendar. Seinfeld is a famous comedian who worked out a system consistently right. New material for his stand up shows. This was before his hit TV show which is a physical calendar. The bigger the better that you mark off each day that you succeed in your goal you will get motivated by these streaks and it is this consistency that is most important to get you results in forming a new habit. Number four identify your triggers which are things you do that lead to your bad habit. Action e.g. stress and you need a smoke or boredom and you want to check what your friends are up to on Facebook and identify the reward you get from that bad habit and your new habit must give you a similar or higher reward to truly replace the bad habit over the long term. Usually we want to feel happy or loved or relaxed or energized by the bad habit. So if you can substitute with a new routine to give you the same feelings you will have success and ideally using a healthier habit that may involve sport learning or spending more time with a hobby. If you want to replace that Facebook time get yourself a Kindle up and read more books online. Youll get rid of the boredom and is a much better use of your time than just stalking people on Facebook. Experiment with different things. Short walks meditation or the new fidget devices. Number five. Use something to set reminders like the coach me up as a reminder function. That way you weren’t just relying on your memory until it becomes ingrained as a new habit. You need some assistance because it’s easy when you start and aware of the need to change. But when you’re not aware you forget over time the importance of changing that habit has another two bonus tips are including And one is making use of what is called the Hawthorne Effect by publicly declaring it to your family or to social on the habit up you have then some accountability and is then natural to improve your performance because you feel you are being watched. The second tip when setting your goals wean yourself off slowly. E.g. the number of smokes day Stangl them instead of going to smoking zero cigarettes when you are currently smoking two boxes of cigarettes a day. Create these micro commitments that are easier to achieve and then will give you momentum and the chemical endorphine which is the brain’s feel good factor because you are succeeding and this will give you more motivation to kick the habit. So we hope this lecture gives you a more actionable guide to stopping bad habits. The most information out there for these tips as are making better use of your time energy and money because bad habits can have negative effects on a lot of things not least your happiness but also the time you can use to do more productive things. So that completes the course. Thanks for staying with us and thanks for listening all the way through the course. We really enjoyed your company and we hope to see you on another one of our courses if you do get a couple of spare moments Please leave us a review on this course. Any feedback that you feel could improve the course or improve our future courses. Thanks for being a great student. We hope to see you on our next course.