How to Stop Bad Habits and Reinforce Good Habits to Change Your Life

So why is it so hard to form good new habits and why is it so hard to break old ones?

Well, one of the reasons is that bad habits give you immediate positive reinforcement. You get what you were looking for, you feel relief or whatever it is that that habit is giving you and they have a delayed negative outcome, and a good example would be smoking.

Well with bad habits. I can tell you one of the reasons why they're so hard to break is that you will have an immediate positive impact from a bad habit, from doing a bad habit, and you have a delayed negative outcome from that bad habit. So if you're a smoker, that cigarette is going to give you instant satisfaction. It's going to give you relief and it's not going to say give you lung cancer immediately. You're not going to see the negative effects.

Now, good habits. On the other hand, they have an immediate, almost negative impact and a delayed positive outcome. So say for instance, working out, working out is hard. You might enjoy it. Hopefully, you do enjoy it, but it is hard work, and you are not going to go from having a big old belly to six pack abs in one exercise so you don't see it right away.

And then if you're trying to create a new good habit, say working out, there is no negative impact of skipping a workout. It's not like you are in shape and you decide, you know what? I'm just going to skip today's workout and you instantly get fat. It doesn't happen that way. So these are things that make habits and forming good ones in breaking bad ones. So hard to do.

So there are three things you need to do if you want to break old habits and put new habits in their place, and the first thing is to come up with a plan. If you don't have a plan, you're not going to get anywhere that you want to go. You need to plan for the hard times because there's going to be times when you don't feel like working out or you do feel like having a cigarette. Whatever it is, you need to plan for that and what you're going to do in those situations.

And number two is creating an environment that allows you to do those good habits or not do the bad habits that you don't want to do. So if it's a good habit like working out, it would mean putting your gym clothes at the foot of your bed. So as soon as you wake up in the morning, you can put on your gym clothes and go work out, or on the other hand, if you're trying to stop smoking will get rid of all the ashtrays in your house and throw them away and it's going to make it harder. So just changing your environment makes habits drastically easier to do.

The last thing is just positive reinforcement. You need to come up with ways to give yourself some type of positive reinforcement. When you do a good habit, so say it's working out. If you work out for a week straight, five days a week, you give yourself a reward of maybe a jelly donut. I don't know, whatever it is that that you enjoy doing, something that you enjoy, something that you'll remember is associated with doing that positive habit that you want to do. It's going to make instilling those habits and making them stick a lot easier.

Listen, we are what we repeatedly do. We are creatures of habit. Change your habits, and you will change your life.