Everyone has habits and they are part of our biological programming that is closely associated with repetition. Some habits are useful, if they serve you to get results you desire. Some of them may be disciplined approach to your duties no matter what they might be and others could be that you may despise physical activities, thus resulting in you becoming a “couch potato”. Whatever you do on a daily basis, regardless of whether you are fully aware of your actions or not, facilitates to some degree the creation of your habits. In turn, those daily actions quietly, behind the scenes materialise the reality you’re experiencing. So, no matter what you do, you are always best advised to observe your daily experiences and carefully evaluate them for purpose. If they are useful and helpful – you are doing something right and if not – start observing your thoughts, emotions and actions. It is in here, in where you will find hidden mechanisms of creation of your unwanted/bad habits.
If and for whatever reason you become unhappy with the way you’re experiencing your reality – apart from questioning your predominant thoughts and emotions – you must also carefully evaluate your habitual daily actions. These are the key triggers you must constantly evaluate if you wish to determine root causes of any emotional dysfunctions or stresses you may have been experiencing recently.
Breaking unwanted habits can be difficult, especially if you have allowed yourself to operate on “auto pilot” basis or doing things routinely without any evaluation for purpose. In such cases, you may have allowed “external factors” to programme your subconscious mind, hence it may be much harder for you to break those invisible programmes. Particularly if such programming was allowed to go on for a longer periods of time. It is for that reason that proper understanding of how habits are formed can ease the unpleasant “habit deletion” process for you.
In our mind/body energy healing course “The Hour of Power”, we will provide you with an in depth information on how to change your habits using the power of your energy field, as well as some mind reformatting techniques. All this will help you make crucial changes in your life, but for now let’s evaluate the process of becoming aware of your habits. In almost all cases, habits are creating in the following three steps:
Reminder – Usually comes in a form of trigger or cue in certain situations, which may ignite automatic behaviours, such as drinking coffee first thing in the morning or feeling nervousness when meeting new people. In almost all cases, these are unconscious behaviours that usually surface out at specific times of the day or may be triggered by specific situations.
Routine – This is automated behaviour associated with the trigger. Desire to drink coffee first thing in the morning makes you rush to your coffee maker without properly thinking what other more important things you may need to do when you wake up. Because the only thought you have on your mind is the taste of coffee in your mouth and only when you satisfy this craving, you are then able to start your day.
The other example could be that you experience anxiety when meeting new people. In those cases, usual triggers might be biting your nails, as well as sweating of your hands, which might add additional anxiety when you need to be introduced to someone new. Regular repetition of same or similar actions initiated by same or similar triggers will over time inevitably lead to creation of habitual routines.
Reward – The reward associated with a behaviour also helps make a habit stick. If you do something that causes enjoyment or effective relief of distress will enhance pleasurable release of dopamine in your brain, which will make you want to do it again. Although, it is slightly different when it comes to nervousness when meeting new people, because it is associated with “negative wiring” that is based on the fear and which has more engaging weight than just pleasurable occurrences. This is because your brain is wired to protect you from danger and anything that causes you discomfort automatically get’s the priority. So it is always good approach to become conscious of what you do habitually.
So what do you need to do to start the process of stopping negative habits?
- The first thing you must do is to learn to calm your body and mind effectively, thus become fully conscious of your predominant thoughts and emotions.
- When you master this trait, you will then be able not only to observe what is going from within you, but also what you’re doing in your external reality. This means that you will be able to consciously register what you do automatically. In this way you will become aware of how you programme your habits.
- In so doing, you will distinguish between two opposing habits and they are: positive habits and negative habits. You will distinguish one from the other by being able to effectively observe outcomes that derive from your automated behaviours. Depending on what you judge positive or negative, you will now be able to consciously remove behaviours that produce negative outcomes.
- In both cases, the key denominator will be your sensitivity to your thoughts and emotions, because they are triggers that always initiate habitual behaviours without your conscious input.
- However, when you become conscious of all aforementioned cognitive tools, you will automatically detect habits that you no longer wish to experience.
- You will do that by spending few days tracking your habits to see whether they follow any patterns.
- Thing you may need to pay attention to are:
- Where does the habitual behaviour happen?
- What situations elicit what types of behaviours and how do they make you feel?
- Are there specific times in the day when these situations or occur or do they happen randomly?
- How do you feel when those situations take place?
- Are other people involved and if so, what is their involvement in creation of these situations?
- Do these situations that invoke your habitual behaviours happen randomly or do they follow certain life patterns? Patterns are usually associated with your predominant mental states that were previously not influenced by any specific event/s.
Let’s say you want to stop your indulgence of watching late night TV. After a few days of observing your evening behaviours, you realise you tend to stay late if you chat with friends after dinner, follow up work or indulge in the social media. All this makes you to automatically watch TV or play video games until late. However, you have also noticed that on other occasions you may go to bed earlier, if you do your full mind/body relaxation, read a book or take a walk after dinner.
Armed with this knowledge, you may decide to help yourself deal with this addiction by removing triggers, such as getting TV out of your bedroom. Turn off your phone and computer by 9 p.m. on weeknights, as well as limiting your social exposure during weeknights too. By making such decision to remove triggers of watching TV or talking to friends – you make it harder to carry out the routine of staying up too late.
This is a great example of hacking the habit you no longer wish to entertain, but in fairness you must strictly follow the routine which is:
- Learn to relax your body and mind completely, thus become aware of your predominant thoughts and emotions.
- Then become super sensitive of your moods by becoming aware of behaviours responsible for non desired emotional experiences.
- Then follow cognitive self assessment of identified triggers that lead to habitual behaviours that are no longer acceptable.
When you start implementing aforementioned techniques, you will over time develop stronger inner connection, greater self acceptance and more agreeable external reality. If you would like to know more on how to effectively identify and then convert negative habits into positive habits, please visit our website www.energy-savvy.com for more information on our 20 weeks mind and energy body altering programme “The Hour of Power” or you may contact us on info@energy-savvy.com and we’ll more than happy to assist you in any way we can.
