10 Unhealthy Habits That Are Undermining Your Personal Growth.
If you want to grow as an individual, you need to get rid of all the bad habits that are holding you back from achieving your potential.
Personal growth has the potential to change your life for the better, but it’s hard to grow if you don’t have certain habits in place. The following 10 habits are unhealthy, and they’re sabotaging your ability to personal growth from the ground up. If you want to make real progress, focus on replacing these 10 unhelpful habits with more positive ones instead. By doing so, you’ll be well on your way to the kind of life transformation that many people only dream about.
Habit 1: Living in the past
When we are thinking about our past, it is common to dwell on the things that went wrong or made us unhappy. The problem with this is that while you’re contemplating and even feeling sorry for yourself, you’re missing out on all of the great experiences and adventures life has to offer in the present. The more you think about your past failures and disappointments, the more likely you are to repeat them. So if living in the past could be one of your unhealthy habits that are undermining your personal growth, it might be time to put those thoughts away and come back to them later (when we are looking at what a good time was had).
Habit 2: Making judgments based on appearances
Do you judge other people because of their appearance or what they wear? Have you ever given someone a hard time for wearing sweatpants instead of a suit or pointed out how terrible your co-worker looks when he rolls in wearing jeans and a t-shirt while everyone else is in dress slacks and button-downs? Then it’s likely that you’ve already started undermining your personal growth by making judgments based on appearances. It may be something small now, but after years of this, the habits compound on each other until it starts to take over every part of your life. Expecting perfection from others while tearing them down won’t help your personal growth — it will push you farther from it.
Habit 3: Focusing on what you don’t have
You see it every day. Someone is looking down at their smartphone and they are playing a game, or they are scrolling through social media, and they just have this look of envy on their face. I get that it is a part of life to compare yourself to other people, but let me tell you what focusing on what you don’t have will do for your life:
It will make you feel bad about yourself. When we look at what other people have accomplished, for the most part, we look for something we don’t have and compare ourselves to them as if someone else’s success has to be coming from our shortcomings.
Habit 4: Having tunnel vision
Constantly devoting all of your time and energy to just one goal can be dangerous for some reasons. Not only does it make you more likely to give up when the going gets tough, but it also prevents you from focusing on anything else in your life. Developing a balance between personal and professional goals is an important part of self-care that will help keep you focused on staying healthy and managing stress. To have tunnel vision, you’ll need to slow down, take care of yourself, and consider your choices. If this is something that’s been keeping you up at night or worrying about things that don’t even matter anymore, then developing some type of balance in your life will help tremendously!
Habit 5: Giving up
There’s something particularly cruel about giving up on your goals after investing so much of yourself in them. Sometimes, it can feel too difficult to face the difficulties head-on. But often, we give up just when we’re getting close to that breakthrough moment. Why do we have this urge to push through the pain? Experts suggest it has a lot to do with wanting positive feedback and tangible results for all our hard work. We know what would happen if we succeed, but if we fail? Failure doesn’t look as appealing at first glance. Instead of giving up though, find ways around the roadblocks you come across — be it reaching out for help or devising a new strategy, or anything else that’ll ensure you keep moving forward.
Habit 6: Dwelling on small problems
No one likes being stressed out and angry, but dwelling on small problems is a habit that breeds both feelings. When you let small problems overwhelm you, you lose your perspective. When you’re overwhelmed, it’s tempting to magnify everything and assume the worst will happen. But the future can’t be predicted; it unfolds in an unknown direction each day. You’ll often find that just by acknowledging that there’s nothing you can do right now to fix the problem (especially if the problem is out of your control), it becomes less consuming and begins to fade into the background of your life.
Habit 7: Holding grudges
Most people don’t realize that grudges are detrimental to your emotional and mental well-being. If you’re holding a grudge, you should set it down as soon as possible before it does irreparable damage to your heart and soul. Remember: Holding on to something you will never change is just asking for trouble!
Habit 8: Lack of awareness of current reality
An unhealthy habit many people have is a lack of awareness of their current reality. By doing this, they sabotage the progress they have made by engaging in other toxic habits such as drinking too much alcohol or being lazy.
Additionally, people often forget about the importance of health and end up overindulging in food or entertainment; this can lead to weight gain and bad habits that make it difficult to get into a healthy routine.
To feel productive and happy about your progress, it is important to know what you are doing right now, and the reality of your life at this moment. This will help prevent backsliding when you inevitably slip up from time to time and give you more motivation for further change.
Habit 9: Expecting perfection from yourself and others
It can be natural to think that the perfect world would be one where everyone is perfect, but this is a problem. Expecting perfection from yourself and others is an unhealthy habit that will take a toll on your relationships and make you feel unhappy with life. It will also create unrealistic expectations for everyone around you, making it more difficult for them to have healthy expectations of themselves. We are all human, which means we are flawed in some way or another. When we stop expecting perfection, we open up space to appreciate one another’s imperfections, support each other when needed, and make the best out of our flaws.
Habit 10: Not getting enough sleep
Poor sleep is one of the worst habits that people can have for their personal growth. Research indicates that sleep-deprived individuals exhibit increased emotional reactivity and decreases in emotional intelligence, attention and concentration, executive functioning, learning ability, cognitive reasoning, and judgment as well as language production. They also have increased mood disturbances and feelings of hostility or aggression. It’s not just how much sleep you get, but what kind of sleep you’re getting.
