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Don't Ditch Bad Habits, Replace Them With Better Ones Instead

Everyone has bad habits; it’s part of being human. But it can become difficult when you are trying to get rid of your dark side. Nobody expects you to be perfect, and ditching your bad habits needs to come from within. You can’t just snap your fingers and abandon year-old habits that you’ve happily maintained until now. You need to be motivated to do the work. But more importantly, you need to recognize what is negative in your habits to be able to move away from them. Because at the core of everything, a bad habit is above all a habit; it’s something you feel comfortable doing, even though it is a learned behavior. You can’t give up on a habit because it means you will find yourself without a coping mechanism for the specific situation you’ve developed your habit for. Bad habits don’t go away. Instead, they need to be replaced by new habits.

Commuting is the most stressful part of the day.
In average, Americans need to commute to work for 51 minutes a day. At the end of the year, you spend over 200 hours getting to and from work. There’s no denying that commuting is a waste of time. But more importantly, it also puts your body through a lot which can have negative health impacts, according to the Time.com. For a start, commuting increases your risk of depression, anxiety and overall sadness. It also raises your stress levels significantly. In fact, the longer you commute to go to work, the more likely you are to arrive stressed out, anxious and tired. More importantly, the combination of nervous tiredness and anger can push you to drive recklessly and dangerously. So how do you snap out of this habit? Unless you can cut commuting out of your day, you need to build new habits instead. If you’re a parent or you know parents, you’ve probably observed how driving with children in the car can transform people’s driving style. With the safety of the passengers at heart, parents are more likely to take their time on the road and drive slowly. Why do they do that? Because they’ve found something more important than getting there on time. And it’s getting there alive, something that too many drivers tend to forget. Maybe it’s time to reconsider your driving priorities.

No, stress coping mechanisms don’t have to  be unhealthy
You probably know someone who smokes, or maybe you do yourself. The main reason why people turn to cigarettes is a way to release stress. The more stressed they feel, the more they smoke. What makes it more difficult to quit, in most cases, is the fact that the brain naturally develops an understanding of smoking as the remedy for stress. In other words, if you don’t replace your smoking habit, then your brain will interpret it as the absence of stress relief. Consequently you’re more stressed and you experience difficult cravings. That’s why it can be helpful to recreate the gesture without the unhealthy impact, using vaping instead of smoking. Vapes come in a variety of flavors that you can’t find in cigarettes — check out Vaporescence.com for more — which can make the transition easier. However, if you want to experience a real success with quitting smoking, you need to develop a new habit to replace it gradually. Meditation, positive visualization and even watching funny videos on Youtube are all effective strategies to kill the stress before it destroys you.

 

You are the reason junk food is so addictive.
The USA is a nation of junk food eaters. We're not the only one in the world, though. Every other rich nation struggles with the same issue. Why so? Because junk food is easy to get — in fact, you can’t walk down the street without coming across a few fast food chains and sugary food shops. The problem that most people experience is that junk food creates an addiction directly into the brain. The balance of flavors takes over your taste buds and forces your brain into craving mode. That’s the beginning of a vicious cycle: You eat junk food, you need more junk food, and so on. In fact, the trick is to cleanse your taste buds with aggressive tastes at first, such as bitter or spicy flavors. Then gradually you can develop your taste for healthier food — as greens can be as tasty as they are healthy.

Don’t let anger get the best of you.
Do you struggle with an explosive temper? More often than not, people who can’t manage their frustration find themselves struggling to feel peace and quietness. Anger is an emotion that is difficult to diffuse, especially if you tend to let your anger get the best of you. Learn to manage your anger, following some of the tips on RealSimple.com is by far the best way to destroy it for good. Anger is disruptive for your relationships, for your concentration, for your health and your overall sanity. When you know that the neurological response to anger lasts less than two seconds, it’s easy to see how waiting it out can change things. Sometimes all it takes is being able to formulate your emotions clearly but without the anger in it. 


Are you really too tired to exercise?
You’d love to work out, but you’re feeling too tired to do anything? Do you know that one of the main reasons for tiredness is the absence of activity? If you’re feeling tired too often — and unless you’re ill — the best way to energize your body is to go to the gym and work out. Take baby steps though; you can’t go from 0 to 100 in a few seconds! Replace tiredness with fitness gradually.

Less TV, more family time
If you feel that the only way to end a hard day is to sit down in front of the TV, then you might want to reconsider. Watching TV can be fun, but watching too much of it will gradually lower your life satisfaction level and distance you from your loved ones. In fact, the more you watch TV, the harder your days will seem, because you need healthy social contacts to unwind. Replace TV with a family chat instead!

Don’t let bad habits destroy you. Instead, discover ways to replace them with new, better habits. 

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