Brain Training For Success – Lesson 4.3 – Breaking A Negative Habit One Day At A Time

Welcome to Lesson #22 of the Brain Training for Success course!

When you have poor habits for dealing with stress, anxiety, and boredom, your life is headed in the wrong direction.

These habits can derail your success and they are challenging to change, so this lesson is especially important.

There are small and simple steps that can be utilized to attack your negative habits one day at a time.

Unless you’re perfect, you probably have a habit that drives you or others nuts.

The conflicting nature of bad habits makes them difficult to overcome.

What Is Your Bad Habit?

Typically, the top bad habits we indulge in are:

• eating unhealthy foods
• smoking
• using chewing tobacco
• lying on the sofa instead of exercising
• and nail-biting

The good news is, however, that whatever negative habit you have, you have the power to change it if you want to.

Consider these strategies for inspiration to break your negative habit now:

Avoid Getting Overwhelmed

Realize your goal now is to simply decrease the occurrence of the negative behaviour.

As you endeavor to gradually reduce the behaviour, you’ll feel better and more in control.

Eventually, you may be able to stop the habit.

Focus On A Daily Mini-Goal To Help You Make Small Adjustments

Let’s say you typically eat more breads and carbohydrates than recommended. You have two bowls of cereal for breakfast and eat two sandwiches for lunch. You think you could reduce your daily carbs. But you’re caught in a vicious cycle and keep eating the same things each day.

1. Set a specific mini-goal to reduce carb intake by making one small change daily. You’ll be motivated to turn around your negative habit. In this example, a daily goal to reduce breads at lunch strengthens your resolve to eat fewer carbs.
2. At lunch, rather than eating two sandwiches, add extra meat, cheese and vegetables to your sandwich. You’ll still have a filling lunch but you’ll reduce your bread intake by half.
3. After you’ve persevered in altering your habit for six weeks to two months, then you can set another mini-goal to replace your second bowl of cereal with a bowl of fruit instead. You’ll feel optimistic and ready to tackle another mini-goal in your quest to reduce carbs.

Use Time Intervals To Control Your Negative Habit

Maybe your negative habit is smoking. The first thing you should know is how many cigarettes you smoke in a day. Perhaps you smoke 20 cigarettes. If you’re awake 16 hours a day, you’re smoking slightly more than 1 cigarette per hour.

1. Allow yourself to smoke one cigarette per hour. During the first day, you’ll reduce cigarette intake by four cigarettes. That’s progress! By the end of the week, you’ll have smoked 28 cigarettes less than you normally do. Now that’s real motivation to continue the path to a smoke-free life!
2. After smoking one per hour for 10 days to two weeks, extend the time interval between cigarettes from one cigarette every hour to every 1-1/4 or 1-1/2 hours. Continue increasing time length between cigarettes until you’re smoking one cigarette every 4 hours—four cigarettes daily.
3. At this point, decide either to further reduce cigarette intake or to quit smoking completely. Your one-day-at-a-time method is working.

Reward Yourself For Your Successes

Daily, document on a calendar how you did. For example, if you met your mini-goal, record “MMG” for “met mini-goal.”

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