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Many people aren’t aware of their everyday habits but, maybe most importantly, they aren’t aware of the power of their habits. Welcome to this Health Minute episode where we’ll dive into the topic of changing your habits as a way of improving your life.
What are habits?
Habits are a set of repeated behaviors, thoughts, and feelings, that you’ve done so many times that your body now knows how to do them better than your conscious mind. Your habits are basically patterns in your brain that you use unconsciously to conduct your life.
Habits are a good thing for the most part but … problems appear when we develop habits that keep us in the same loop of negative thinking and feeling. That’s when negative outcomes start manifesting in our life.
The power of your habits is best used when you create habits that promote healthy living, better relationships, greater development in life, and so on. Learning how to change your habits in order to create a better life for yourself is what we’ll be focusing on in this article.
Conscious vs Subconscious Mind
Our mind operates on two levels: the Conscious and the Subconscious. While both serve vital functions, they work in tandem and they are connected in ways that science is just beginning to understand.
Here’s a simple breakdown of the two minds:
- The Conscious Mind is aware of the present moment and can only do one task at a time. For example, we might be aware of our breathing, our environment, or the people around us. The Conscious Mind is also the creative and reasoning mind, and is the part of the mind that can decide on goals.
- The Subconscious Mind is of critical importance for all the functions of our body, taking care of all the processes at the cellular level. Our Subconscious Mind is also responsible for our habits, from mundane tasks such as breathing, sleeping, and organ function, to our unconscious modes of thinking, acting and feeling.
It’s worth noting that at least 95% of our behavior comes from the subconscious mind, and this includes most of our thoughts, actions and feelings. The Subconscious Mind has a huge data processing capacity compared to The Conscious Mind, being about 500,000 times faster (five hundred thousand times).
How do we form habits?
Our habits start in the conscious mind when we learn and repeat something, and they slowly become unconscious once we have mastered a certain behavior. Once a habit is transferred into the subconscious mind, it is now executed in an automatic way.
Since we can put our conscious attention on just one thing at a time, the subconscious mind takes care of the rest of our life. Our conscious mind simply does not have the processing power to handle too much information, while our subconscious mind does have a huge processing power.
Think about this … you are not aware of the trillions of processes that happen in every second in your body. You’re not even aware of where your foot is when you’re walking … unless you put your conscious attention on it. You are not aware of all the small movements that you do with your toes as you walk, and so on.
Lastly, some habits can be the best ally for us while other habits can turn into our worst enemy. When talking about health, we could say that we have health-promoting habits but we also habits that are not aligned with a healthy lifestyle (unhealthy habits).
How to change your habits
In order to change and transform ourselves, we have to become conscious (aware) of our unconscious habits. We have to become aware of our undesired habits that reside in our subconscious programming, and to change them for habits that contribute to a wanted positive development.
This is true when it comes to all aspects of our life, no matter if we are talking about health, relationships, jobs, money and so on.
Here’s a brief formula on how to change undesired habits:
- Start by observing your patterns of actions, thoughts, and feelings in your everyday life. Who are you right now?
- Next, research a wanted new way of thinking, acting and feeling. Who do you want to become?
- Start practicing this new way of thinking, feeling and acting in a conscious way.
- Repeat this mode of thinking, acting and feeling until your subconscious mind will wire these new behaviors into habits.
My advice is to be patient since changing old habits takes time and will. You’ll have to rehearse (embody) these new behavior patterns until they become your new habits.
There’s one more trick that I’d like to mention here: You’ll have to really desire this change in your heart, otherwise the old habits will be hard to break, if not impossible. So we could say that, besides repetition of the new habits, you’ll also have to add desire into the mix of changing your habits.
Once you will do this, your life will slowly change and improve in exactly the ways that you desired. This is the true power of your habits!
