Correcting bad habits

Bad habits surround each and every one of us, and correcting them takes a lot of effort and patience, so I thought I’d give you all my piece of mind on the subject.

First of all, everyone has them. For some people this may be drugs or homicidal tendencies, but even if you don’t smoke, drink or gamble, you may have a lot. Coke drinking for me is one thing, “forgetting” to put the dishes in the dishwasher is another. In other words, to practice the art of breaking bad habits you don’t need to have extreme ones.

Why we have bad habits

Bad habits in my experience are formed by two major factors. One is laziness, and the other one is “muscle memory”. Muscle memory is a term I learned when I started playing guitar. If you learn something incorrectly and it forms a habit, you will find it very difficult to control it. If you try to play it correctly, your muscles will not let you, you will play the faulty note for example. If you really try you will sort of place your finger in between the good note and the bad note, and with a lot of practice, you will unlearn the wrong way, and learn the good way. Some real life habits are formed the same way, and need considerable effort to be corrected.

Positive and negative methods

I think the laziness is harder to beat than muscle memory. I found that the muscle memory part is defeated with ease because the impetus is larger. When playing guitar I spent hours and hours learning things, so taking the time out to unlearn something and do it again is worthwhile, since I will play better and in the process I am also playing guitar, so that’s cool.

Laziness is very hard to stop and you will have to stop worrying about direct productivity for a while. In essence, I could say, just take it like a man, stop being lazy and do it, but that’s not how people work. You need to set yourself some goals, look forward to the time when you will not have the habit any more. Alternatively, you could actually make it impossible for yourself to be lazy, here’s how.

First of all, you need to make sure that it really is very hard to be lazy, you need to create a situation, where being lazy will mean disproportionally more work or hardship. For example, I really, really hate going down in the basement. I would ask my girlfriend to take all but 4 plates into the basement and put it in the closet with the most spiders in it. I guarantee you I will use the dishwasher.

You could also choose a reward, so if I use the dishwasher I get a 3 minute back rub. Again this reward is not controlled by me, if I don’t make good on my goals, I can’t back rub myself.

Productivity

Undoing bad habits will most probably take quite some time. Remember that productivity doesn’t necessarily mean doing a lot in a short time. It means that you do “x” amount of quality work in the shortest possible time. If the shortest possible time for stopping a habit is one year, then it’s not a problem if it does take that long.

Since habits have a bad tendency to come back, I would spend extra time if necessary, since in the end, we are trying to fight these habits so that our productivity increases overall. Remember to be patient, only go for goals you know you have a good chance of achieving and don’t be afraid to think in longer terms.