How To Break Bad Habits   5 Easy Ways To Overcome Bad Habits & Addictions
Channel: Entertain Me
Date: 26/12/2017

How can we overcome bad habits and addictions? Well, I have five different methods that when used together will guarantee that you never fall into the bad habit again. 
It will take some initial effort on your part but soon the habit will be no more. 
5. Understand your triggers for the habit/addiction The first thing we must do in order to overcome a bad habit is to understand our triggers. 
When you catch yourself doing the habit make an effort to slow down and analyse the factors that lead you to begin it. 
Think back on all the times you engaged in this bad habit, what was common between them? - Did a particular image pop up in your head? - Was it an emotion that you felt? 
- Was it a thought that you had? - Perhaps it was a sound that you heard? 
4. Remove your triggers to remove the habit It is incredibly difficult to beat bad habits with pure willpower. Our willpower is finite and will not always be on our side. 
In order to overcome this hurdle, you must learn to simply remove the triggers from your life. 
If you have a habit of eating unhealthy food, trying to resist all the junk food in your house or at work will simply be self-torture. 
It is far easier to resist the temptation when the temptation is not in sight. 
Maybe you are addicted to coffee and you drive past a Starbucks every morning before work, trying to resist the coffee will be incredibly difficult. 
It is far easy to just change your route to work so that you avoid the streets with the Starbucks! 
You need to remove your triggers in such a way that it will require more willpower for you to continue the habit than it would for you to stop it. 
This is the hardest and easiest step in regards to removing bad habits. 
It’s the hardest because it requires a lot of energy to commit to during the beginning but it becomes incredibly easy as you continue. 
3. Begin an identity level shift To truly break free of a bad habit or addiction you need to see yourself as someone who doesn’t engage in such activities. 
Often times it’s not even the habit that keeps us addicted but more so how we define ourselves through the habit. 
The things we do often become part of our ego or self-image: - The person who runs every morning sees themselves as a ‘runner’. 
- The person who writes books identifies themselves as a ‘writer’. - These labels help us define ourselves and easily categorise ourselves in this confusing world. 
These labels could, however, be detrimental to you if you are trying to remove a habit. 
This is due to our minds not wanting to destroy a concept which we have labelled as being ‘us’. 
The smoker who sees themselves as ‘a smoker who is trying to quit’ and not ‘someone who doesn’t smoke’ will inevitably be met with resistance. 
The subconscious mind will do subtle things to sabotage the smoker’s attempts until they have returned to their original identity. 
The body loves homeostasis, change is chaos. To change yourself begin to see yourself in a new light. You are not someone who is attempting to stop an addiction or bad habit. 
You are someone who doesn’t fucking engage in it in the first place 2. Make yourself accountable with dire circumstances Some people need the added pressure to break habits. 
Make yourself accountable by setting up situations in such that you have to break the habit. You need that same fire underneath your ass. 
Tell your friends that you will give them $100 each if they catch you engaging in the bad habit. 
Make it public; let everyone know that you have committed to overcoming the habit. 
1. Replace the bad habit with a good one The last step in completely removing a bad habit or addiction is to replace it with one that is more empowering. 
Find out what pleasure/reward you receive from the bad habit and replace it with a good habit that offers a similar reward. 
Often it will take some time for you to start feeling the same rewards from the new habit but if you are consistent it will come. 
You obviously won’t instantly enjoy kale shakes after being addicted to McDonald's for the past 5 years. 
You will enjoy them after a while though when you become less desensitized to simple pleasures.