When beginning the process of addiction recovery, individuals often have a plethora of bad habits to unlearn. The following techniques can help you escape these habits and implement healthy habits in their place. The habits you engage in regularly can play a large role in your ability to recover and manage a healthy lifestyle.
Know Your Habits
Take the time to list the activities you tend to engage in daily or nearly every day. Reviewing this list, categorize each activity into positive habits and negative habits. It is especially important to understand the habits that you frequently engage in that may be negatively impacting your recovery.
If you are not aware of your negative habits, it is impossible to escape them. The first step in creating healthy habits and escaping bad ones is to know what your current habits are and how they are currently affecting you.
Make Habitual Goals
After reviewing your current activities and habits, observe the habits that are beneficial to your well-being. Write down habits that you wish to incorporate into your lifestyle that will contribute to your success in recovery.
Create a Schedule
Schedule out the practices you wish to frequently engage in to ensure there is time in your day to complete them. Set up a morning routine, completing a small task every day. Having a schedule to follow and base your progress on can help you keep your mind focused on the new habits you wish to implement.
Refocus Your Lifestyle
Many individuals fear escaping their bad habits because the habits are a part of who they are. Eliminating these habits and implementing new habits can change who you are as a person and cause a drastic life adjustment. This can be hard for individuals in recovery because so much of their life is already changing.
Refocusing on who you are and who you want to become will give you the perception you need to move forward. Instead of thinking of your habits as an extra obstacle to overcome, think of them as part of your addiction. Habits are a form of addiction to some extent and need to be overcome if they are negatively impacting your life. Looking at this aspect of your recovery as a whole can help you see how changing your habits is not changing you, but it is helping you become the person you desire to be.
Escape Your Habits
As you review the negative habits you are currently engaged in, ponder why these practices are negatively impacting you. Understanding how they negatively affect you can make it easier to avoid further engagement. Set a goal to either stop engaging in the habit completely or lower the frequency of the practice. If bringing the habit to an instant halt seems too overwhelming, you can narrow it down to a couple of times a week and slowly work to eliminate it.
Pay Attention to Triggers
There are often a variety of triggers that contribute to bad habits. Noticing specific emotions or triggers that lead you to engage in these bad habits can help you to consciously be aware of your decisions. When one of these possible triggers arises and you feel the desire to engage in a negative habit, try replacing it with an alternative healthy habit instead. Being mindful of this change increases your ability to create new habits and refrain from desiring the old habit.
Visualize Success
Close your eyes and visualize yourself engaging in the habits you desire to create. Refrain from thinking of yourself participating in the bad habits you are trying to escape. Write down how you feel when envisioning this. If the habits you are working towards are beneficial, you should feel a variety of positive emotions and an increased level of motivation to implement these practices.
Allow Time to Adjust
When you are working to change your habit, and you do engage in a bad habit you are working to eliminate, it is tempting to feel down on yourself. Understand that while we want to work toward eliminating these habits, it is a process to get to that point. When you find yourself falling back into these habits, take the time to observe what led you to that decision and use it as a learning experience. There will be many slip-ups during this process, and it is important to allow yourself to adjust to these major changes.
Understand the Importance of Habits
The impact of our habitual behaviors is often overlooked. Our habits are consistent reinforcement of specific behavior and lifestyle. Ensuring the habits you are engaging in leads you to a healthy mindset, and physical health is vital. One of the easiest ways to undo bad habits is to understand how drastically they are impacting your overall goals.
Escaping bad habits can be incredibly difficult due to the prior reinforcement of these behaviors. By reviewing your current habits, understanding their effect on your well-being and recovery, and creating a list of new habits you wish to engage in, you can work towards escaping these bad habits. Paying attention to your triggers and emotions that led you to engage in these habits and increasing your self-awareness can make this process of elimination easier. Allow yourself time to adjust to the change in lifestyle and accept that occasional slip-ups will happen. Visualizing your success and perceiving how you will feel after escaping these habits can increase your motivation to succeed by implementing new healthy habits. The process of habit creation plays an essential role in recovery. To learn more about these techniques and how to escape bad habits, reach out to Dream Recovery at (949) 732-1960.