How Understanding Habits Changed My LIFE!

This is why you habits haven’t changed despite your efforts

Habits are something we do often without thinking. This is what makes habits both a blessing and a curse. We all love our good habits, and detest our bad ones. The continuous spiral of bad habits only leads us into worse situations, or at best a constant level of stagnation. However, we’re all aware of our bad habits in some regards and we also do wish to change them, and for those of us who have tried to no avail, we often wonder if we simply just aren’t cut out for it. Maybe, we are meant to not ascend. I’m here to tell you that, that is ridiculous. You can change, you’ve simply just been doing it wrong.

Let’s use the example of over eating. Something we all have had to, or in most cases, still deal with. The steps we usually go through are as follows.

  1. We identify that we are over eating. Whether that be due to our change in appearance, mental realisation or in my case, your family has pointed it out to you. You then do some self-reflection and decide that you want to change. You want to eat healthy. Not only that, you also want a six pack in the next month. We’ve all been there.
  2. Now once you’ve decided to change, you get rid of all your junk food and now you’re eating salads, drinking more water than ever before and going to the gym at a rate you wouldn’t have thought possible. It’s been about a week now, and you can already see the results taking place.
  3. Then you’re on a couch again a week later, with even more weight than you began with

Does this sound familiar?

Your goal was “to become healthy” and you already knew you were on the right track so why couldn’t I just stick to the plan I knew was already working. It’s because your willingness to change was only on the surface level. You focused on the goal you wanted to achieve and not the person you wanted to become.

The three components to changing your habits

The three components of change are; goal orientated, process orientated and identity orientated. Let’s walk through this for the person in the example above.

Goal: To become healthy

Process: Got rid of unhealthy junk food, drank lots of water and started going to the gym regularly.

Identity: [Empty]

And this were many of us go wrong. It’s great that you realised the goal you wanted to achieve, and put a process into place to achieve that goal, but you haven’t yet changed who you are.

Change your IDENTITY

If you want a habit to stick you need to change your identity. If you are a person who is ”trying” to be healthy, when you see that opportunity to grab that tub of ice-cream or those cookies, you can say ”I am just trying after all”. Once you change your self image to ”I am a healthy person, who is on their journey to achieving better health”, when you see those same temptations, you will think ”I can’t have those, because that’s just not who I am anymore”. Out of these two personalities, which one do you think will achieve their goal.

Now, which one are you?

And now, which one will you be?

Post By: Jesudara Akinboye

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