Breaking Bad Habits Through Self-Discipline

This is a guest post from Jackie Cortez from The Prevention Coalition.

Whether you want to stop eating refined sugar or finally break things off with a woman once for all, breaking bad habits requires sacrifice and self-discipline. By indulging in our bad habits, we may be harming our overall mental and physical health. Breaking the habits isn’t easy, but with the right strategies and some self-discipline, success is possible.

How Keeping Habits is Harmful

For some habits, the negative effects are obvious. According to Prevention, fingernail biting can damage future nail growth so that they grow shorter and wider, lead to nail discoloration, and cause infections. And while cracking knuckles here and there isn’t bad for your health, if it’s a daily habit, it can lead to arthritis.

For other habits, you may not be aware of the lasting negative effects. You’re probably aware that skipping breakfast deprives your body of the fuel it needs to start the day. But if making a habit of skipping breakfast could “permanently slow down your metabolism, putting you at risk for issues like weight gain and diabetes,” cautions Prevention.

Using your phone in bed is bad, as you undoubtedly know. It can be detrimental to sleep schedules, warns Prevention. The blue-green wavelength of light that’s emitted by cell phones stimulates you and suppresses melatonin, which makes you feel sleepy. Without melatonin, it’s harder to fall asleep and stay asleep. But the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America conducted a study which found that persistent melatonin suppression could lead to an increased risk of breast, colorectal, and prostate cancers.

These are just a few examples of bad habits that can have small or big effects on your health. There are countless others that people may feel the need to break, like negative self-talk, drinking alcohol or constantly being late. No matter the habit, there are ways to break it, but one of the challenges is that bad habits are often driven by unconscious decisions.

Admitting You Have a Problem

Psychologist and author James Claiborn told the Huffington Post that in order to break a bad habit, you must become hyper-aware of the habit. Although you may think it’s best to just ignore it until it goes away, Claiborn says that plan won’t work. Keeping a record of when and why you do it and how it makes you feel is imperative. “We need to understand the behavior before we can change it effectively,” says Claiborn. It will take self-discipline to keep a good record, but sometimes physically seeing how often you’re checking your emails a day can help cut your habit.

In the seconds before engaging in the bad habit, go through the thoughts you’re having. Saying out loud, “One more time won’t hurt me,” or “I know it’s bad, but I deserve this,” can make you realize how absurd you’re being. Again, don’t ignore these thoughts; it will take self-discipline to listen to your permission-giving thoughts without giving into them and just thinking about them critically. Also, while it’s great to feel optimistic about overcoming bad habits, don’t become so confident that you don’t take the obstacles you’re going to face seriously enough.

Focus (Correctly)

Instead of setting negative goals and focusing on what you’re not going to do anymore, set goals in terms of what you are going to do. The brain’s habit-learning system won’t learn anything by not doing, says the Huffington Post. For example, instead of saying, “I’m going to stop biting my nails,” focus on a new, more desirable behavior, such as playing with a slinky whenever you feel the urge to bite your nails.

One of the most important things to do in order to break bad habit is to ensure you have an environment that aids in your success instead of hindering it. Creating an environment that makes new desirable behaviors easy and bad habits hard to do is crucial. For example, if you’re trying to break the habit of eating refined sugar, clean out your fridge and pantry. There’s no need to even have the temptation in your home. You’re making a sacrifice, but the sacrifice results in a healthier you.