Out With the Old: How to Get Rid of Bad Habits

Do you want more from your life? Letting go of old habits, thoughts and behaviors is an overlooked step in the process of personal change. What’s holding you back from moving forward?

Empowering Change

Only 7% of people stick to their New Year’s resolutions. If you want to make a change in your life, there are ways to increase your chances of success. Let this simple process guide you through making life-changes you can be proud of.

• Review – Give yourself the time to honestly reflect on your life over the last year.
• Remove – Identify and remove subconscious patterns that limit your growth.
• Renew – Create a new self-identity that embodies the person you are becoming.

By following this process you can actively change the mental and emotional programming underpinning your daily choices and behaviors. When you bring unconscious habits (like snacking) to your own conscious awareness, the door for change is wedged wide open.

Thinking through limiting beliefs, triggering emotions and self-sabotaging actions initiates a subconscious-shift that breaks bad habits and starts supportive ones. Self-deception is a protective mental mechanism that keeps us safe, while also keeping us stuck.

REVIEW – Loving Critical Appraisal

How do you remember your year? Its peak moments and its lows influence your actions the following year. We often overlook our successes and focus on faults, which reduces our motivation for change. Answering these three questions about 2021 will help you focus on your achievements, and nourish your ability to keep growing for years to come.

What Went Well?

• Listing achievements, no matter how small, builds self-esteem and confidence.
• Start your 2021 review by listing five accomplishments, and what they mean to you.
• Consider areas like: health, lifestyle, exercise, nutrition, emotions, projects, hobbies, skills.
• It might take a few moments for positive data to flow from your mind, be patient.

What Didn’t Go as Well?

• The last year was incredibly challenging, pushing people to their mental and physical limits.
• Reviewing mistakes, failures or missed opportunities really helps refine our future goals.
• Don’t get down on yourself; just collect the data needed to understand what went wrong.
• List five things that didn’t turn out the way you wanted and what you could do differently.

What was the lesson?

• By clarifying highs and lows of the year you can reflect on what you learned.
• What have you become aware of about yourself or others that could guide you?
• In which areas of your life do you need to put more, or less, effort and priority?
• List five lessons, or patterns, that you notice in your successes and disappointments.

REMOVE - Getting Rid for Good

The subconscious mind is a reservoir of everything you’ve already done. It repeats the same thoughts, emotions and actions as yesterday, with little regard for consequence. Most of these ingrained patterns were developed during childhood and rarely serve our adult needs.

When the storage on your phone is full, you can’t install new apps - your mind has a similar ‘caching issue’. Here are some things you can let go of, freeing up mental space to imagine, and become the new you:

• Let go of avoidance – are you trying to ignore something important?
• Let go of negativity – do you focus too much on problems, and not their solutions?
• Let go of guilt –remorse without action is paralysing, can you make amends?
• Let go of resentment – can you forgive people who have wronged you?
• Let go of jealousy – what quality would you like to develop in yourself?
• Let go of self-criticism – can you encourage yourself in a nurturing voice?
• Let go of vampires – some people drain your energy, can you say goodbye?
• Let go of excuses – are you being honest with yourself and others?
• Let go of perfection – “progress is progress, no matter how small” - Dr. Sebi.
• Let go of waiting – don’t put things off until the right time, start immediately.

RENEW - Mental Gymnastics

Every day your body makes 330 billion new cells and 1,500 new neurons, each with over 7,000 connections to other brain cells. The potential for physical and mental change is immense, when you start in the right place. Reframing how you think needs to happen before you can act differently.

Repeated patterns of thoughts and activity create our habits, personality and self-identity. If your inner vision is that you are ‘lazy’ or ‘unhealthy’, then this mental template guides your behaviors. Fortunately, you can upgrade how you see yourself, then let the changes in attitude and actions follow.

• Purpose – What is your future vision for yourself? What ambitions do you have?
• Identity – What is your personal mission? What role do you envision for yourself?
• Beliefs – What motivates you to act? What permission do you need to grant yourself?
• Capabilities – What skills or techniques would you like? How do you want to feel?
• Environment – What opportunities do you want? What constraints will you overcome?

These five categories outline the mental shift needed to perceive yourself differently. By answering the questions (writing text, collecting images, or simply imagining yourself) you can guide the (more powerful) subconscious mind to direct your actions in accordance with your new personal vision, and not against it.

Give yourself a theme for the next year – what will 2022 be for you? Where will you focus your time and energy? Throughout January we will be sharing practical tips, psychological short-cuts and herbal heroes to help you make 2022 a year to be proud of. Shift your perception to change your life, and your body.