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Habits are a big part of our everyday life yet few people are aware of the simple fact that our habits shape our lives in a big way. In this Health Minute article we’ll try to understand what habits are, how they contribute to our development, and how to change our life by first changing our habits.
Let’s define habits
Habits are a redundant set of automatic, unconscious, thoughts, behaviors and emotions that are acquired through repetition. A habit is when you’ve done something so many times that your body knows how to do it (action, thought, behavior, emotion) better than your conscious mind.
We can say that habits are a set of rehearsed beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, actions or reactions that you’ve done so many times that your body (as the unconscious mind) now knows how to do them better than your conscious mind.
In terms of everyday life, we can definitely say that our habits are great. Actually, we couldn’t do much in our everyday life without our well rehearsed habits.
From the simple actions and behaviors that we do and use to conduct our life (think walking, eating, using a fork, picking up an object, and so on) to more complex actions, our habits are essential to our living. We could say that habits are the way that we incorporate repetitive behaviors in our mind, in order to save energy and to evolve.
How our habits function
But there is one more thing related to habits that I haven’t told you yet … we have both conscious and subconscious habits. Actually most of our habits are unconscious. In fact, we are conscious of only a few of our habits, while most of our habits run on an unconscious level. Since most of our habits reside in our Subconscious Mind, we aren’t conscious of their execution, or even of their existence.
Putting things in perspective, the Subconscious Mind is the mind that has a lot of “processing power” compared to the Conscious Mind. That’s the reason why most of our habits reside at the subconscious level and are being executed automatically, without us even realizing their existence (not to mention their execution).
Neuroscience tells us that 95% of our the time we are using our Subconscious Mind, and we are conscious of only 5% of our mind activity (Conscious Mind). Putting things in perspective, we could say that.most of the time we live.on auto-pilot.
Over time, as we lived and evolved, we developed habits that are productive and other habits that are less productive – let’s call them positive habits and negative habits. Some of our habits (negative habits) can actually become detrimental to our health, relationships, happiness, or to our life in general.
How to change unwanted habits
In order to change and improve our life situation, we need to change our habits.
But in order to change our habits, we first need to identify our unconscious habits (that do not promote positive outcomes) and to replace them with positive ones.
So the questions that we should ask ourselves are along these lines:
- What are the programs (habits in this case) that I run on an unconscious level every day?
- What kind of habits do I have?
- How do these subconscious programs influence my life?
- What habits do I need to have in order to achieve my goals?
- What habits does a successful person have, and that I could emulate, to help me change my life situation?
- Who do I want to become, and what habits do I need to develop in order to become that new person?
In order to change our life situation, we have to become aware of our unwanted habits. Once we’re aware of those negative habits, we’ll have to use our conscious thoughts and behaviors to slowly change those negative habits.
The truth is that everyone has unwanted habits. The key is to become aware of this simple fact, and to work on identifying and changing those unwanted (negative) habits for more positive ones.
Takeaway
The hardest part of changing ourselves is to become aware of the negative patterns in our life. That is where the majority of the work has to be done.
Doing this will take time and effort, and will require us to become present in our everyday life. Once we slowly become aware of our undesired habits, it will become easier and easier to change them. Once we start creating new habits, we’ll slowly be able to transform ourselves thus transforming our entire life.
