You are what you are today because of three things. And what you will become in future is also determine by these three things. These three things are your thoughts, your feelings and your behaviour. They determine who you are and what you will be. They determine how successful you will be, the rate at which you will make progress in life and the impact you will make. Behavioural psychologists agree that 95% of everything you think, feel or do will be determine by your habits. So your thoughts, feelings and behaviour are basically controlled by your habits. Your habits will either break you or make you. It will either make a failure out of you or a success out of you. Your habits go a long way to determine how healthy you will be. How financially buoyant you will be. How successful you will be in your career, relationship, marriage and academics. Your habits virtually control every aspect of your life whether you know it or not. Seeing how important habits are, it is of necessity for us to try to cultivate good habits that can help us live better lives, be happier and more successful. What then is habit?

Habit is something that you do often and almost without thinking especially something that is hard to stop. A habit is a routine of behaviour that is repeated regularly and tends to occur subconsciously. Everyone one of us have habits and we activate hundreds of them on a daily basis. Your habits are reflected in your communication style, the way you treat people, the way you do your job, the company you keep and even how you spend your leisure time. There are basically two type habits. The good habits and the bad habits. The good habits are difficult to learn but easy to live with. They can help you to be healthier, successful and happier. Examples of good habits include: Eating healthy diet, exercising, gratitude, studying, managing money wisely, striving for excellence, practicing good hygiene, always telling the truth, reading regularly, punctuality, respect for authority etc. The bad habits are easy to learn but difficult to break. They can ruin your life, cause you to fail and even cut short your life here on earth. Examples of bad habits include: Smoking, excessive drinking, eating junk food, watching too much TV, being late for appointments, procrastination, focusing on the negatives, womanizing, masturbation etc

Habits are formed in different ways but follows the same pattern. The time it takes to form a habit ranges from a single second to several weeks. Some habits of medium complexity like waking up early, listening to motivational tapes while in your car, exercising, being punctual to work or appointment takes from 14 to 21 days to form. But some habits can take a second to form. For example, putting your hand on a hot stove or touching a live electrical wire will give you an intense and immediate pain or shock. The experience may only take a split second. But for the rest of your life, you will possess the habit of not putting your hand on hot stoves or touching live electrical wires.

The SBC model of new habit pattern formation helps to explain how habits are formed. The S stands for Stimulus (also known as context cue), B stands for behaviour and C stands for consequence (also known as reward). The stimulus can be prior action, time of day, location, or anything that triggers the habitual behaviour. This could be anything that one’s mind associate with that habit and will automatically let a habit come to the surface. The behaviour is the actual habit that one exhibits, and the consequence is the reward or feeling of satisfaction that we get from the behaviour. For examples, seeing a pornographic pictures or videos, can cause one to masturbate in order to release his sexual urges. After masturbating, the person release and get relieved feeling sexually satisfied. If the person keeps repeating that the process (habit loop) for several days, it becomes a habit. In this case the pornographic picture is the stimulant. The act of masturbation is the behaviour. While the sexual relieve or satisfaction is the consequence. That is how habits are formed.

STEPS FOR DEVELOPING A GOOD HABIT

Developing new habits most especially good ones can help you to become a better version of yourself, achieve your goals and become everything you want to be. Developing good habits does not come easy. But once the habit is developed the reward can be awesome. Here are the seven steps to developing good habit

1. Make a decision: Decide on what type of habit you want to develop. It could be waking up early at a specific time, exercising on a particular day every week or staying away from watching too much television. Whatever habit you want to develop, it starts with deciding which one and making plans on how to go about it. If you want to be waking up by 5am everyday, you can decide to set alarm to help you wake up.

2. Never allow an exception: Once you have decided on what new habit you want to form, the next thing to do is to ensure that you do not give room for exception during the formative stages. You must discipline yourself to stick to the plan. No excuse whatsoever. If you decided to stay away from eating junk foods, then discipline yourself to stay away from it without exception.

3. Tell others: Tell others most especially people close to you, your decision to form a new habit. That way you are making yourself accountable. It will help you to stick to your plans and follow through because you know someone is watching you.

4. Visualize yourself: Create a clear picture of yourself already having the new habit and living with it. The more often you visualize and imagine yourself acting as if you already had the new habit, the more rapidly this new behaviour will be accepted by your subconscious mind and become automatic.

5. Create an affirmation: Write out an affirmation and repeat it to yourself regularly until your new habit is form. For example, if you decide to wake up early every day, you can have an affirmation like this: “I get up and get going immediately at 5.00 each morning”. Repeat these words the last thing before you fall asleep. It will help to register it on your subconscious mind and before you know it, it becomes part and parcel of your system.

6. Resolve to persist: Many times you will find yourself failing to follow through your plans of developing a new habit. Whenever it happens, you have to be determine to continue no matter what. If you fail once, continue and keep disciplining yourself to stay through. If you do not quit, you will win.

7. Reward yourself: Once you have succeeded in developing the new habit, ensure you reward yourself. Give yourself a threat. Do something for yourself. Each time you reward yourself, you reaffirm and reinforce the behaviour.

DEALING WITH BAD HABITS

Bad habits are not good for anyone. They will ruin your life, destroy your health, relationship and even your career. Physically, mentally, emotionally, socially and even spiritually, they are not good. They just help to waste your time and energy. Bad habits are mainly caused by stress and boredom. Most times, stress and boredom may just be at the surface. There might be a serious underlying issues beneath the stress and boredom. In trying to break bad habits once it is form, you do not eliminate it, instead you replace it. Trying to stop a bad habit without replacing it with another good habit will always end as an effort in futility. All of the habits that you have right now – good or bad – are in your life for a reason. In some way, these behaviours provide a benefit to you, even if they are bad for you in other ways. This is why simplistic advice like “just stop doing it” rarely works. Instead you need to replace a bad habit with a new habit that provides a similar benefit.

HOW TO BREAK A BAD HABIT

1. Choose a substitute for your bad habit: It is very important that you choose a substitute for your bad habit. You do not break bad habit rather you replace them. You have to plan ahead of time for how you will respond when you face the stress or boredom that prompts your bad habit. What are you going to do when you get the urge to smoke? For example, you can replace it with a breaking exercise instead. Whatever it is and whatever you’re dealing with, you need to have a plan for what you will do instead of your bad habit.

2. Cut out as many triggers as possible: When trying to stop a bad habit, try as much as possible to remove anything that triggers it. If you drink alcohol when you find yourself in bear parlor, then stay away from going to bear parlor. If watching pornographic videos makes you masturbate, then delete or remove such videos around you.

3. Join forces with somebody: Look for someone who has the same bad habit with you and is willing to quit too to join forces with. If you can find someone who smokes like you and the person is willing to quit, you can team up with the person to quit the act of smoking. If you cannot get someone like that, then you can tell someone close to you that you intend to stop this habit and be accountable to the person. When you know that someone is watching you, it will help you to discipline yourself to stop

4. Surround yourself with people who live the way you want to live. This is very important. While you do not have to ditch your old friends, you just have to look for people who have the kind of habit you want to have and stick around them. If you kep hanging out with people who have the kind of habit you are trying to stop and watch them exhibit the behaviour, you will find yourself slipping back to that bad habit.

5. Visualize yourself succeeding. Create a visual picture in your mind of yourself actually free from the bad habit. You can have a clear mental picture of you living a life free from smoking, womanizing. The more you replay this pictures in your mind the faster it will help your subconscious mind to accept the new you and replace the bad habit.

6. Use positive affirmation: You can use the word “but” to overcome negative self-talk. For example, you can “I’m fat and out of shape, but I could be in shape in a few months from now”

7. Plan for failure: When you find yourself getting frustrating of failing to keep up, do not give up. You have to be persistent no matter what.

Your habit will go a long way to determine how much success you will record in life. So try as much as possible to start now to develop good habits that will help you to achieve your goals and make progress in life.

Be happy. Be successful. Be YOU.

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Nice write up...... thanks for the advice

Very informative, timely and worthwhile.