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We all have habits, from the way we make our cup of tea to how we eat, to when we get up. We all stick to certain habits. They make us feel comfortable and know where we are in the world.

Breaking Bad Habits. Making Good Habits. Read the blog at www.acsebooks.comHowever, habits are not always good, they can be bad for us.

There are obvious things that are bad habits. Every time you are in a mood or bored, you reach for the wine or a cigarette or the bar of chocolate, or you jump in the car instead of walking five minutes to the local shops.

Habits can be hard to break. Any habit can be hard to change.  I am sure you have heard of people planning to write a novel, lose loads of weight, start jogging every day. They stick to it for a day and then give up. They don’t change their habits.

There is debate on how long it takes to break a habit. In the 1950s, Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon, found that it would take patients 21 days to get used to seeing their new face or adjusting to an amputation.  He stated that “These, and many other commonly observed phenomena tend to show that it requires a minimum of about 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to jell.” (From his book – Psycho-Cybernetics).

Other researchers have argued that it can take a month to break a habit.

Do we have to break a habit or can we change it? Starting and maintaining a new habit can be difficult. But adjusting an existing habit might be easier.

Every time Billie has an argument with her husband, she heads straight for the fridge and eats chocolate. What if Billie could amend that habit? Instead of buying chocolate and keeping it in the fridge, what if she kept grapes or strawberries and every time she had an argument with him, she went and eat a strawberry. Chocolate is often thought to be a comfort food, so the idea of a grape or a strawberry might not be so appealing, BUT the rest of the habit is still the same. Argument with husband, head to the fridge, eat. It is simply that she is changing what she is eating but not changing the rest of the habit.

Nellie wants to get up early every morning so she can start going to the gym or writing a novel. She sets her alarm every day for 5am and every day, she presses snooze every five minutes for two hours. She often wakes up tired and cranky because her sleep has been disturbed and she hasn’t managed to go to the gym or write anything. So why not use the snooze button? The alarm goes off. Instead of pressing snooze and turning over, Nellie could sit up in bed.  She could get a notebook from the side of her bed and write down her dreams or thoughts about the story she wants to write.  If she did this for 30 minutes or an hour, she might feel more awake and then get up and go to the gym. She is still not getting up straight away when the alarm goes off, but by sitting in bed and writing, she is making good use of her time and waking up slowly.

Think about your habits. Think about what you want to change about your life, what you want to achieve and see how you can make your existing habits work for you rather than trying to start new habits.

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