LazaHealth Medical Library
#Patientinterview, #Self-improvement
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Mahatma Gandhi once said, “Your actions become your habits. Your habits become your values. Your value becomes your destiny”
Aristotle’s imperative – “Know Thyself” still rings true today. To ditch bad habits or stick to good ones, you need to know who you are. And you are likely to fall into these four categories.
- Easily responds to own and others’ expectations
- Always completes everything on the to-do list.
- Tend to hesitate when there are no clear-cut rules or expectations.
- Scrutinizes what’s expected and complies only if they make sense.
- Takes a long time to gather momentun when starting new habits.
- Finds motivation from statistical proof or concrete evidence of effectiveness or success.
- Has no problem meeting expectations when they’re imposed.
- Finds it difficult to impose expectations independently.
- Resists all expectations.
- Guided by authenticity and self-determination.
The simple truth is that for us humans, making decisions is hard. Making decisions uses up too much energy on a daily basis.
- In order to make adopting a habit easier, take decision making out of the equation.
If you need to separately and actively decide whether you are going to carry out a chosen habit each day or not, you will most likely end up not doing it. Just put it into your calender and just do it!
- Start monitoring your behavior.
Consider your diet. In 2010, 70 percent of Americans were overweight. Being overweight is the number one cause of cancer and diabetes. It is therefore no surprise that the most common habit that people would like to adopt is a better and more healthy diet.
One of the most effective methods to form such habits is to keep a food journal in which you write down everything you eat. Research has shown we’re terrible at gauging how much we consume. Keeping a food journal will help you get your eating under control by tracking how much you have ACTUALLY eaten.
If you want more exercise, you can buy a pedometer, a gadget that counts your steps. You will then have actual data to measure quantitatively your improvements over time that will give you that boost of confidence and motivation to continue.
The usual daily routines are so ingrained in us that it is extremely hard to make even the smallest of changes. If you trully want to bring big changes to your life, move to a new place and start afresh.
- Creating a whole new routine from scratch will allow you to include and cultivate the desired habits for success and happiness.
- Making it convenient greatly increases the likelihood of carrying out the good habit instead of the bad ones.
Most people do not intentionally cultivate bad habits with the desire to be in possession of the said habits. Instead, they usually form as a result of it being the path of least resistance in most cases. Remove that hurdle, and it becomes much easier to form good habits. If you place junk food at the top most shelf of the kitchen cupboard, which requires a stool to reach, it is a guarantee your propensity to indulge in junk food will decrease. Similarly, placing a yoga mat right beside your bed will mean more morning yoga sessions in the week. Try it out!
Apart from making it easy. try to make it fun as well.
- Making it fun is an extremely effective way of influencing a certain behaviour.
When the stairs in a subway station in Sweden were transformed into a keyboard that played notes as you walked up them, the number of people who took the stairs instead of the escalators increased by 66 percent.
Conversely, we should strive to make bad habits inconvenient to indulge in.
- Even a slight inconvenience in carrying out the bad habit can have a substantial subconscious effect.
For instance, studies have found that people place smaller portions of food on their plate if they are using tongs instead of the more convenient serving spoons.
Another study showed that when the lid of an ice cream cooler was left open in a café, 30 percent of then bought ice cream. Whereas only 14 percent of the customers bought ice cream when they had to open the lid themselves.
Try it!
Anne Bass, the millionaire and socialite, was once forced by burglars to open her safe. To the burglars’ surprise, they didn’t just find money and jewelry inside – they also found chocolates. Anne Bass had been cleverly using this psychology principle to cut back on her chocolate consumption which was beginning to get out of hand, as she confessed.
Research has found that we spend around a quarter of our waking life struggling to resist some kind of temptation. Our success in adopting good habits or ditching bad ones depends on our ability to resist temptation.
- Anticipate and minimise exposure to temptation.
Take the story of the Sirens in Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus is warned against listening to the haunting song of the Sirens, famous for luring seamen to their deaths. He comes up with a simple, but effective plan to protect his crew. He makes the crew put wax in their ears to block out the sounds of the sirens.
- Beware of falling into the trap of making rational excuses.
One of the most oft-used excuse loopholes is the “Moral Licensing Loophole”. We allow ourselves to indulge in “bad” behaviour after being “good” for a considerable amount of time, which then quickly excerbates. Such “rewards” are counterproductive.
Trying to suppress your thoughts or cravings will only exacerbate them, so a far better approach is to shift your focus, or distract yourself with good habits.
- Research has shown that if we learn to move our attention away from a craving, it will weaken within just 15 minutes.
Research indicates that distraction as a strategy functions best when we shift our attention to something fun and absorbing.
Pairing is simply taking two activities, one that you enjoy doing and one that you want to do but find yourself lacking in motivation, and making them dependent on each other. This makes it easier to continue the good habit.
#GoodHabits, #Habits, #Psychology, #SelfImprovement
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