Here’s Why Bad Habits Are Important to Change Our Lives
Bad habits are important sometimes to change our lives easily and effectively.
Changing our own lives is important.
Even so, we see it as something that is hard or too much of a task. I have failed many times to change my life while actually there’s a better way to do it because,
Changing your life is not supposed to be hard.
It’s supposed to be unaware but progressing, or, I could say, easy.
I have tried many times to change my life and failed because I forced myself to push hard. It is actually pretty dangerous to change your life if you don’t have a proper plan. You end up becoming much worse than before.
You might have tried to stop gaming because you’ve been playing for 4 hours every day. Then, after 3 days, you failed. Then, after you failed, you now play games again as a “revenge” for those 3 days of no gaming. You end up playing for 8 hours, twice as long as you used to.
You feel much worse and have decided to just play games for your entire life.
That’s where most of my “resolution” or “changing my life” went.
I end up doing much worse than before, far from what I wanted to achieve.
To avoid making your life worse than before, you need a proper plan to change it.
At least a plan to help you achieve what you want and easy enough for you to tackle. This is why I tried to plan many times and found the best one, in my opinion, for changing life in an easy way. I hope that it could change your life too.
With a simple plan, you can start changing your life and increase your chances of success.
The key to this is consistency.
In order to become consistent with your life change, you need to start with the amount you are ‘capable’ right now, which is small in your own measurement.
Which is why I use the simple strategy of starting small.
You might think that Atomic Habits by James Clear plays a big part here. Well, you are right, but not most of it.
Starting small is more than just building a habit or eliminating a habit. The plan is that we start small but are still doing the bad things we do.
“Wait, why do I need to do my bad habits? It won’t be effective!”
Well, yeah, it won’t be “that” effective, but that doesn’t mean it’s not working.
Bad habits are a big part of changing our lives in an easy way. Taking a big step in this case is actually removing all your bad habits at once and hoping to become David Goggins overnight. That’s not recommended, though.
You need to start small because you are still the same person.
- You might do all your routines and eliminate all your bad habits at once, but you are still the same person who jerks off in front of your computer or scrolls on social media for 4 hours every day.
- You might run this morning and successfully eat healthy food today, but you are still the same person who keeps eating junk food at night and eats a lot of sugar.
At the end, you are still the same person.
The role of bad habit
So, in order to counter that, you need to change all of your bad habits, except one.
This is important because you need to change yourself without really warning your body that you are changing yourself.
Does it really make sense? Let me explain.
Your body or your mind will be aware when you are trying to change your life. It will notice that there’s something unusual that you are doing.
For example, you might have used to watch YouTube before going to sleep for 2 hours, but now you are not doing it. Your body or your mind will notice it, triggering you to watch Youtube, but this time not.
Then, you will feel uncomfortable and end up fighting yourself until you lack willpower and burn out, which will result in you doing all of your bad habits.
We need to counter that by eliminating other bad habits except one bad habit that is difficult to remove.
I recommend you do the most difficult thing to remove. For example, gaming, smoking, etc.
This way, you can make yourself unaware of the progress of changing your life and end up achieving your goal of eliminating most of your bad habits. Then you can continue to eliminate your last bad habit to clean it up.You don’t have to start your morning routine, your night routine, or other good habits.
It’s optional, but I recommend you just focus on eliminating your bad habits because those are the root of why you didn’t develop your good habits.
So, what you need to do is:
- List down all of your bad habits, from the hardest to the easiest to remove. (in your own measurements)
- Circle down the hardest one, and then try to remove the other bad habits except that hardest one.
- After you successfully remove other bad habits for 30 days, you can start focusing on that one bad habit to remove.
At this time, you are still not allowed to engage in the other bad habits, but you are allowed to use them for good purposes. For example, using social media for making content or socializing. For movies, you can use it when you watch with your friends.
The first 30 days are the most strict.
After 30 days, you don’t have to become strict again with the bad habits.
Why 30 days? Because 30 days is the average, habits could be reset.
Even so, it still depends on how addicted you are.
Then, after you successfully eliminate your bad habits, you can feel free to start your good habits, like meditation, reading, etc. You are free to take your life improvement to the next level.
This is why you might need to start planning ahead about what good habits you want to build and for how long, and you can use this free template I made that could answer those questions.
In that template, you can plan what you want to change and what purpose you want to achieve in your life.
Even so, do you really want to change your life?
That actually depends on yourself.
“True life is lived when tiny changes occur.”
— Lev Tolstoy
Disclaimer: This does not work for drugs or other big sources of “bad” dopamine. Because you might end up feeling much worse and doing all of your bad habits. So, for this kind of bad habit, you need to focus on that one first. You can try to play games as an alternative, though, to avoid drugs or other big sources of “bad” dopamine.
I’m not a scientist or a professional on this; you can do more research to decide whether to follow this advice or not.
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