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Why it's so hard to get rid of bad habits?

Posted on:October 24, 2020

Some time ago I read a book - The Power of Habits, written by Charles Duhigg. I wanted to learn, how to manage my habits and the most - how to get rid of the bad ones. The author of this book tries to prove, that everything which we’re doing can change. Just by changing our doing path. This can change our whole life.

What is a habit?

Habit is the thing you’re doing without thinking. For example, if you’re daily eating dinner at 1 p.m. - it’s a habit. In coding - if you, for example: have own style of brackets,

if () {

}

or

if ()
{

}

You aren’t thinking when writing brackets in your code. We call this easily as a habit. Bad, good - it’s your pick.

Types of habits

There are good habits, neutral ones and also… bad ones.

Of course, we want to get rid of the last ones. But we can’t. Why?

Bad habits are challenging. They’re difficult to overcome, especially, when we have them for the whole life.

How to get rid of them?

We should follow two steps:

  1. Recognition. You have to look at them and ask yourself: How long I’m doing this shit?
  2. Realize. You have to realize, that what you’re doing is wrong. You have to realize, that the process to change this habit won’t be comfortable. It’s gonna be hard.

Take the example of trying to eat more healthly.

Starting from being fatty, if you develop a habit of doing workout 3-4 times a week and eating healthier, in some months you can change your styling about one hundred percent. It sounds great, yea? But it’s hard to develop. We aren’t prepared to change our habits (like eating trashy food) in one second. Saying: “I won’t eat that food from now” and trying to do this - probably you will fail. That’s about what Charles tries to explain - we have to do this by small steps. We want to reach the goal fast, but we can’t. We will fail. But if we will start with small steps, as I mentioned earlier, we could probably win.

For an example of eating healthy. Start with eating one of five meals healthier. After some time, add another one, and another and another. In the end, you will change your whole eating habit and probably, you won’t want to get back into trashy one, because your style change and you will look better.

We can do this way with every habit. I’ve used this for reading books. A few years ago I didn’t read. Zero books in a whole year - for now, me, it sounds ridiculous, such a waste of time. I could read many brilliant books and have much more knowledge than now, which probably could give me more money or feel better with myself.

But you still need to remember. It’s going to take time. It’s going to take commitment, and it’s going to take perseverance.

It’s a slow process.

Applications

Apps can help out us here. Many of them allow us to pick a habit which we want to develop and every day if we mark as done, the line will look good (line of progress).

I’m using https://www.thehabithub.com/ and totally recommend it. It’s simple, easy to use application decicated to habits. Try it:)

Similar apps you can find in https://www.reddit.com/r/Habits/, where are many fantastic people which trying to change their lives, by improving habits.

Also, you can try Habitica, which I didn’t even try, but many people recommended it to me.