How to change a habit

Habits are patterns that run our lives. Habits take the pressure off of needing to consciously control every aspect of daily life. These patterns run in the background allowing us to focus our efforts on more important things. Our brain creates these patterns to help us run common tasks on autopilot so we don't have to spend our attention on them.

Despite the incredible power of habits, there are probably a few habits you'd like to remove. I'm going to go over exactly how we can remove these negative habits in our lives in this article and replace them with habits that will make our life better. Once you master the ability to change your habits you can rapidly increase your own personal growth.

Step One: Analyze

The first step to change any habit is to analyze why we have the habit in the first place. If a habit were entirely destructive, we wouldn't use it. The reason any habit exists is because at some level it gives us positive reinforcement. Even if that positive reinforcement is incredibly underwhelmed by the pain it creates, it has to exist, otherwise we simply wouldn't participate in the habit.

Analyze how making this habit modification will impact the other software you are currently running. Take time to ask yourself how this will impact the various aspects of your life. Will adding more exercise take away from your family, business or leisure time? What aspects are going to be affected and how?

Step Two: Form a Strategy

Now that you have analyzed how your habit will affect your life, you need to form a strategy for introducing the new strategy. Likely you will need to make a bunch of minor habitual adjustments in order to smoothly transition your new habit. Identifying as many of these minor changes will be the difference between making habit surgery go with a scalpel or with a club. The failure of most habit changes lies in this step. Most people do a brief overview of step one and then jump right into surgery. Then when they fail they believe that the problem was they didn't have enough willpower. Willpower can be a good tool, but it can't compensate for poorly conceiving this step.

Step Three: Prepare

Preparation is the third step. In this phase you need to change your intellectual need to change a bad habit into a good one, and add the emotional component. Tony Robbins has some great info on this step as he says that you need to change the neurological associations you are making. You need to associate incredible pain to your old habit and incredible pleasure to your new one.

Just from reading this I think you can get the idea. The pain needs to be real and tangible. You need to feel agonized, disgusted and sick when you think of going back to your old habit. If you don't have this emotional connection, a lasting change will be much harder, if not impossible. I always laugh when I hear people asking if they can still eat what they want when they are on their diet. Diets that proclaim that you still will be able to eat all those foods you love. What do you think made you overweight and unhealthy in the first place?!?

You need to get to an emotional threshold where the idea of putting those potato chips and fast food in your mouth feels disgusting. You also need to love the idea of eating whole grains, vegetables and lighter meals. If you still love greasy foods, you'll never be able to give them up.