Bad habits can sometimes be changed more easily than you might think.  Occasionally it takes a bit of practice and determination but success will come if you want it enough. Here’s how.

How we learn habits.

When you were a baby, you crawled in order to get from A to B. And as your body developed in strength and coordination you began to toddle…you practised toddling and began to walk with more and more confidence. Sure you fell over a few times but you got there in the end. 

As an adult, you can still crawl along the ground because you haven’t forgotten how, but you just have a better way of getting about now.

Think about this for 2 reasons.

Firstly, when we do something repeatedly, like toddling or walking, we create a neuronal pathway in the brain. This becomes like a highway in the brain that you travel down each time you repeat that habit or behaviour and this reinforces it.

So everything from the way we type to bad driving habits can be either reinforced or changed.

Choosing a new habit over the old one is simply a matter of doing things differently and creating a new neuronal pathway. To start with, this pathway will be a bit rough and difficult to follow (think about trying to write with your left hand if you’re right-handed) but in time and with practice it becomes easy.

This is the other reason the crawling/walking analogy is useful. Babies don’t give up learning to crawl and toddlers don’t give up learning to walk. They keep getting up after they’ve fallen over but as adults we sometimes forget that learning something new - a new habit or a new skill - can take practice.

It’ll be the same when you’re trying to replace an old habit with a new one.

The Stages of Learning

When we understand how we learn it makes it easier to see how far we’ve come in breaking old habits and creating newer, better ones.

1.  Unconscious incompetence means that you don’t know what you don’t know. Take smoking during pregnancy for example. There was a time when we were unaware that there was a possibility smoke could be harmful to the unborn baby.

2.  Conscious incompetence. At this stage, you are aware but don’t know what to do about it.

3.  Conscious competence. You know you need to do something to make a change but it feels difficult to adopt the change - you’re making a new neuronal pathway at this point.

4.  Unconscious competence. Now you don’t have to think about the new behaviour when you do it and it comes automatically.

Good habit-breaking habits.

1. Define the habit you’re not happy with. Go through it in your mind and remember what you’re thinking and feeling when you perform it.

If there are negative emotions associated with the habit (boredom, frustration, anger etc), what better ways are there to deal with this? What could you do instead that is more constructive?

If we take negative gossiping at the office water cooler as an example, what alternative behaviour could you have to change this? It might be something as simple as changing what you say from destructive comment to positive ones and seeing yourself as the person who can lift office morale.

2. Decide how much you want to change your habit - when you want it enough, this will make it easier to follow through and to keep practising a new behaviour pattern when the going gets tough. Is what you do/say causing you or someone pain or affecting your health in some way? Do whatever you need to do to make it imperative to change.

3. Keeping a journal or notebook will help you clarify your thoughts and let you read back so you can see how far you’ve come. This is part of a process of increasing your self-awareness.

4. If you want to tell others what you’re trying to achieve then do that.  You may need their help and support and perhaps a friend could act a coach and hold you accountable to yourself for breaking your bad habit.

The key to personal change is to be patient and to keep practising. In our ‘instant’ world we expect change to happen in a snap. Remember the baby and don’t give up.