The Importance of Good Habits

So how do you build good habits?

The habits that you have now are built into your subconscious mind through repetition of doing things you have done for years. Depending on who you picked them up from or how you built them, they may be beneficial habits for creating the health, relationships and lifestyle you want, or they may not.

How did you get the habits you have now?

You get most of your habits from childhood before you reach the age of 6-7. You download an enormous amount of information that you are going to need to live and behave appropriately in society. Until you are 6-7 years old you are just using your subconscious mind, therefore you do not think consciously about what people say and do. You just watch and copy. If your parents then had good habits you will have taken these on and they will benefit you for the rest of your life, on the other hand if they did not have good habits when it comes to health, relationships, lifestyle etc, then these may be what you’d like to change. Your environment as you are growing up, going through school etc, all the people you grow up with, will all have added to these habits. Lets not be too hard on our parents ?

Your subconscious mind runs around 95% of your day, only 5% of your day is controlled by your conscious mind. Therefore, these habits that you now have are controlling what you do every day, they control how you feel too. The way you think is a habit. The way you think leads to how you feel and how you feel leads to how you behave.

Now you know how the habits you have are created and how much impact they have on you life, how do you change them if they are not giving you good health, good relationships and the lifestyle you want?

How long does it take to create a new habit?

It is not really a matter of how long it will take to make a new habit but how many times you need to do the new thing, a habit is built by repetition, the repetition of doing something, saying something or hearing something.

This fires and wires the neurons in your brain and the more they get fired the more they wire together and create neural circuitry and pathways. The brain is the most easily changed organ we have in our body.

If you want to create a new habit and stop repeating an old one, you must start implementing new behaviors every day and the more you do them, the quicker they will become a new habit.

Three helpful ways to creating new habits and beliefs;

Gratitude

Focusing on the things you have instead of the things you don’t have creates more positive thinking. Creating better ways of thinking and better habits.

Affirmations

Repeating affirmations, saying them out loud fires and wires the neurons together in your brain not only creating new habits but new beliefs too.

For example, you may have negative beliefs leading to negative habits, you may feel you are not good at something or not worthy. These are just beliefs and things you have told yourself habitually. This doesn’t mean they are true. You could start today to repeat ‘I am so happy and grateful that I am good at (taking some time for myself) this would fire and wire new neurons and create new neural pathways and circuitry in your brain and you would start doing new things subconsciously to become to change that thing that you would like to change. 

Say every day that ‘I am so happy and grateful that I am worthy of everything that I desire’ at first this may feel uncomfortable, something new usually does, but these are great ways to create positive new beliefs and habits that make you feel good and benefit your life.

Meditation

Meditation is my favorite! It is such a powerful tool to become more mindful, becoming more mindful and self aware will help you notice any negative beliefs that you have and notice the negative behaviors you may have so you can then change them. It is easy for us to fall back into our old habits, becoming mindful is very important to be able to create new habits, watching how you think every day will make a big difference with creating new habits to good health, happy thoughts and a lifestyle you love.

Tags: