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Bad Habits and How to Change Them

What do broken dreams, lost opportunities, and wasted time all have in common?

They can all be attributed to bad habits. One time or another, we’ve all attributed something as being a bad habit or had someone point something out to us as one.

Recognizing detrimental habits tends to be much simpler than actually solving them because habits are integrated into our lifestyles.

Changing those habits requires a bit more effort than may seem worth it at first, but if we understand the roots of those habits, the process becomes less painstaking.

The Difficulty of Breaking Habits

Change is never easy to adapt to. One way or another, it requires strength of will; the same is true of breaking habits. The hardship of breaking them is evident in the sheer number of people who give up altogether. Bad habits are almost like additions – things that bring us pleasure despite not being healthy choices. In these situations, they’re even more difficult to bring an end to. Removing habits that bring you a sense of comfort puts you in a situation where the world seems daunting.

The Biology of Habits

According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a lot of the struggle in breaking habits can be attributed to the properties of your neurons. The formation of habits alters the way your brain processes information. Changes in neural activity rewire your brain to include these habits.

Extended practice of the habit strengthens the neural changes that occur, making them increasingly permanent. These habits form in the basal ganglia, the part of the brain with some control over both learning and addiction.

Simply overcoming a habit won’t remove the neural connection that has been formed in the brain. Thus, someone can’t completely break a habit.

If a situation ever arises that can be associated with the past habit, the neural connection will the stimulated, and the possibility for the reemergence of the habit surfaces. Cigarette-shaped objects, ashtrays, or any instance of smoke can be all that’s needed to get a “quitter” to pick up smoking again.

Old vs. New

Because continual practice reinforces habits the way it does, new habits are much easier to break than older ones. Old habits are tantamount to part of your lifestyle while newer ones more closely correlate to short-lived fads, in terms of breaking them.

To get a better perspective on the idea, consider a man who makes coffee for himself every morning at 7 o'clock. After adjusting to the routine of doing this for years, the man stays in a hotel for work-related matters. Having no easily accessible kitchen and no way to make coffee for himself, he feels quite strange and disoriented. His morning is incomplete, even if he does manage to get coffee.

One thing that keeps the man from completely losing it is the expectation that he’ll be able to fall back into routine the very next day. If he had to go an entire week without the luxury of his own coffeemaker, he might slowly begin to lose a grip on himself. A victim of OCD, to reach towards an extreme, who compulsively brushes their hair might have a panic attack if there’s no brush nearby.

Adjusting Your Habits

The first step on the road to recovering is recognizing the source of the habit. If you understand how an isolated event became part of your life, you can attack the problem at its roots.