Make Your Bad Habits a Pain to Grow Better

When one person helps another to get rid of a bad habit, we call him a helper. But what about getting rid of bad habits? If you want to stop allowing yourself, start turning your own bad habits into a pain in the ass.

As the advice site Barking Up the Wrong Tree explains, one of the best ways to break a bad habit is to make it harder. Even adding an extra twenty seconds to your habit can give you enough time to break the cycle. Remove the batteries from the remote control if you don’t want to watch too much TV. Don’t buy ice cream at the grocery store unless you want to eat too much at home. Interrupting your bad habit is a convenient first step to getting rid of it.

So where to start rewiring? First, identify the bad habit. Then make it a pain in the ass. A study by Professor Cornell Brian Vansink found that food becomes difficult to obtain, and people eat less and lose weight. Harvard happiness expert Sean Achor calls this the “20 second rule” …

You don’t want the transition from one bad habit to the next to be easy. This is how it spends hours checking email, then Facebook, then … If you have bad habits, you want to stick to your plan.

It’s tempting to view your habits as a means of self-control, but bad habits usually arise for the exact opposite reason. When we do not make an informed choice, we resort to what seems most convenient or natural to us. This process of stopping these bad habits ensures that these habits don’t feel comfortable or natural to you. As soon as they require extra effort or foresight, you can start making other choices.

How To Be Productive: 5 New Research Backed Secrets | Bark on the wrong tree

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