“The Habit Loop: How Your Environment Encourages Bad Habits”
Reading articles like this always make me contemplate my own personal habits, good and bad.
“Bad” (I am putting the word “bad" in quotation marks because I'm not sure I like labelling these habits as bad. They are more just habits that I could benefit from bringing awareness to…):
- I pick the skin on my lips when I’m bored or when I’m thinking. Yeah ok… gross.. but just being real here. @joshlaforet gets on me all the time about this. Love you huney.
- I get “hungry” for candy/chocolate after dinner. Speaking of real… no, it's definitely not hunger. This is 100% a habit that I have developed over time.
- I pick up my phone and start to scroll IG or FB when I’m waiting for something or someone.
- If someone I’m with is eating more, I will eat more too.
Good
- I drink a full bottle of water in the morning before I have my coffee.
- I set my vitamins out beside my water bottle before I go to bed at night so that I don’t forget to take them in the morning.
- I have turned off the notification on my computer so that I can be more productive when I’m working. I have a very difficult time resisting the urge to immediately read the messages people send me… and multitasking is a fallacy. I don’t multi-task… I only get off track and have to refocus. My one and only form of multi-tasking is folding laundry while watching Netflix.
- The first thing I do when I sit down at my desk in the morning is write in my gratitude journal that my hubs gave me for Christmas. The prompts in the journal make it so that I don’t have to think… I just need to write.
So when I read an article like this and consider the triggers of habit building - time, mood, location/context, preceding action, and other people - I can always relate my personal habits back to one of these.
The reason this is impactful is it allows me to be mindful and aware of how my actions are affected by external factors. But also how I can control my own habits simply by being more aware of them.
Buying into the power of your own controllable factors is critical in transformation.
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