Do You Have a Habit You Want To Break?

Andrew Rosen wrote out 5 steps to breaking bad habits;

Step 1: Identify your bad office habits

Routine makes us feel safe, but don’t hide under the umbrella of familiarity for too long. The problem with habits is that we let them control us. Our subconscious kicks in and tendencies take over—without us even thinking about them.

Monitor yourself for a full week as you go through average work days. Jot down any potential habits in a job journal. Whether it's an arbitrary ritual like tapping your toe three times before you enter the building or sipping on an afternoon diet soda, include it on the list. The point here isn’t to nab every habit and routine, but to find a starting point.

Step 2: Determine which habits are hurting you

Let's shoot big; identify the habit that affects you most negatively. It could be wasting time, putting physical or mental stress on your body, fatigue (from that diet soda), etc. Look at the short-term and long-term picture and prepare to face your worst habit head on.

Step 3: Stop your habit dead in its tracks

Sometimes stopping a habit is as simple as recognizing it. Next time you find yourself carrying out the habit, say to yourself, "Stop!" If you have the luxury of yelling it aloud, do it. If you’re in a public office, say it in your head (rather than risk looking bonkers).

Create a physical or graphical reminder that represents the negative outcome of the habit, and access that reminder when you need it. With the soda, for example, hang a picture of decaying teeth near your desk (or maybe in a drawer you open often, where your co-workers won’t see it). Next time you reach for that soda, you’ll at least consider drinking water instead

Step 4: Replace your bad habit with something awesome

Because office life is conducive to repetition, the same routine that created your habit might help you replace it with something useful. Instead of reaching for a coffee or candy, or rather than participating in gossip and complaints, do something that’s good for you.

Here’s one example: every time you receive a new email, instead of dropping what you’re working on, take a deep breath and clear your mind. Another positive work ritual, one that helps reduce eye strain, is practicing the 20/20/20 rule. For every 20 minutes of staring at a computer screen or document, look 20 feet away for 20 seconds.

From breathing to stretching to resting your eyes, there are a million positive things you can do while at work.

Step 5: Hang in there

Some habits are deeply embedded, so don’t expect to replace them overnight. Instead, focus on vigilantly monitoring your habits and routines for weeks or months. Consider making “habit inventory” a weekly ritual.

Habits can be powerful, so why not have them work for you rather than against you? Master the art of habit replacement and watch your work experience improve.

His article was about the steps to take in breaking workplace habits more specifically. I have a few of my own I am working on breaking;

1. Gossip/Bad-mouthing; I found certain times of day and specific things were doing it. Not watching the news and changing my home page periodically to a new, more positive website was the habit that had to first be broken to get me out of the gossip and bad-mouthing habits.

I also had to realize that whoever I am speaking about, I can’t possibly know everything about them because a news broadcast said so, therefore, I don’t qualify as an authority on them.

2. Furrowing my brow; My love for Beethoven sometimes has me trying to look like him. When I get tense, I clench my jaw, furrow my brow and quit breathing. I am glad to say I now breathe deeply several times a day. It started out telling myself to, now I just do it regularly.

3. Anxiety; what was once considered a warranted emotion turned into a habit. I found myself getting anxious or upset in reaction to things that simply don’t require concern. Basically, my guard was up for anything coming my way. I had to assess what was a problem and what wasn’t.

4. Arguing too much; I have learned to pick my battles because essentially, I know how to argue about everything under the sun. If you are looking to pick a fight, you will find something to complain about.

5. Controlling people; I finally realized it isn’t my job to change anyone or make sure their life is going according to my plans. I have learned to let people make their own choices. In relationships, if we try to force someone to love us or pay attention to us, it’s not going to be the kind of love we will ultimately want anyways.

I want to add a sixth one on and that is Packratism or Pakratitis. It’s the accumulation of unnecessary clutter in my life. :)

Before breaking any of these habits, I had to really want to though. Without the desire to change things or break habits, it’s almost impossible to follow through.

Do you have habits you want to quit? Is there a step that has to happen inside your head first before that can be broken for good? Maybe we are rushing to break the habit before the mindset is changed.

Off to take more extraneous items to Good Will,

Karen :)

“The hard must become habit. The habit must become easy. The easy must become beautiful.”
~Doug Henning

Time Stealers & Bad Habits

The following video contains the blog written below for those who prefer it in Video Blog Format. :)

It was TomS on thepublicrecord.com who sparked this. He had watched my Video Blog; ‘Something Has to Give’ and commented below. I want to share what he wrote;

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“I had dinner at the Princeton University restaurant that Einstein would frequent. I sat next to his table which was preserved as he would have it. Even a genius has his habits. LOL.

It is the hardest thing to do -- break a cycle of behavior. I think about that a lot with my son. What habit am I putting into him that I really don't want him to have? What habit can I break that I keep repeating? (not talking about the little habits... I mean the big ones that change your life every four years or so ... as if we were still in school and needing to graduate from something). It takes a bird’s eye view to see those and how rare is it for an ordinary man to see that without the help of someone who knows better?

I really like Maya Angelou.... "Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it." —Now that I know better, I do better." — Maya Angelou ... Love that woman!”

(*Addendum; not the word believe)

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If you happen to catch my building Manager in between her soap operas, you’ll see her doing the exact same thing she did yesterday. She will be watering the front gardens, vacuuming the halls or taking her small cart and walking it to the grocery store. Her daily rituals worked for me because I knew exactly when I could let the stray cat in or out.

If the power is out when she needs to watch her soaps, it’s a tragedy. I have a full understanding of what soap operas can do to a person. My Grandmother lived with us on the farm and watched the whole afternoon line-up. Starting at 1 pm she’s watch Days of Our Lives, All My Children, Another World and the Young & the Restless. I think General Hospital might have even been on another channel that she’d flip back and forth to.

Now if watching soap operas for one third of your waking hours is something you truly love and you are totally ok with it, that’s cool. But I suspect this sort of daily marathon is to combat boredom or loneliness. After all, the story line behind a Soap is designed to induce gossip and intimacy. Every cliff-hanging moment keeps you on the edge and wanting more the next day. I think living through others can either spice up our own life or keep our mind off of something really bad.

This habit my Grandmother had seeped into our lives too. Would Ashley and Victor ever get together or would Nikki have a stranglehold on him for life? Would Katherine and Jill finally kill each other?

I just had to know! Every single day, I had to know!

What started happening, is life got in the way of TV. Summertime would get you hooked and then dang it if school didn’t interfere! I was faced with my choice; my education or the life of Jill Abbott!

Ok so very dramatic, but you get what I am saying. Soaps can be an anchor around your feet. For me, they were a bad habit that my Grandmother ingrained in us.

There were other bad habits growing up like smoking, alcohol and drugs. Those tend to be the habits we think about. There are support programs for those, but there wasn’t a support program for the following bad habit that I developed and I am not sure there is one. I had to ditch it myself.

The bad habit is “negativity”. Most people engage in it in some fashion. It’s either gossip, hate, racism, political wars, religious discussions. The bad habit of negativity seeps into every corner like poison through a building’s ventilation system. We don’t understand what is making us sick and it might not even be enough to kill us. But I am seeing spots of this sickness everywhere. Pessimism is also a bad habit.

When I say that these things are habits, it’s different than those who are actually negative or pessimistic with just cause. Doesn’t that even seem ridiculous?

I call them habits because we have developed a lingo in society where we go for the bad reaction based on it coming out of our mouth that way. We give our own leaders negative titles because everyone else does. We will spew out sentences that didn’t come from our own thoughts, but because the news, magazines and radio keep saying it over and over and over. It’s like we have become programmed to say them. Yesterday at 6 pm, you maybe watched the news and they blurted out something to make you say you hate someone or something. What we don’t see is that our daily habit or ritual of watching the news told us exactly what to feel at that time of day. You may even leave the broadcast, jump on Google and find more related stories to keep THEIR ritual going.

The reason I stopped watching soaps and the news is because I didn’t want my life or their opinions dictating how I think, how I feel or how I live. Their news is not the only news. WE make our own news. WE create our own story. We say where we will be at 6 pm. NOT them.

Breaking a bad habit or ritual takes a massive amount of courage. I believe it’s the biggest enemy on our person. We can break this if we can actually identify it. Nobody can make you join their religion, their group, their political party or Monday Night basket-weaving session. WE get to say how we spend our time.

What I did was took a look at my day and had to really identify what discussions were stealing my soul. I had to do some Math and see where my time was wasted. I decided I wouldn’t be guilted into joining anything that did not enrich my life and those around me.

I put my TV by the curb and I changed my home page from the news channel it was always landing on. Time spent playing an instrument or painting my dolls beats the hell out of the negative broadcast.

If you get joy from that, you are the only person I know who delights in it.

Snapping the face off of my cello,

Karen :)

“Time goes, you say? Ah, no! alas, time stays, we go.” ~Henry Austin Dobson