My nagging habit

"There is an old proverb which says that “habit is second nature,” but an artificial habit is stronger than nature. Take for instance, an old tobacco-chewer; his love for the “quid” is stronger than his love for any particular kind of food. He can give up roast beef easier than give up the weed."
P T Barnum

I speak a lot about habits. In fact it could argued that I have a habit - and it goes like this - I nag.

* I nag you about doing stuff
* I nag you about thinking about things in a different way
* I nag you every time I send you an email - have you done this, have you done that - I sometimes feel like I am your mother and you're the kid who hasn't done his / her homework.

I don't want to nag you, but re-reading some of the posts I send you, I feel that is exactly what I am doing. It is a habit I have gotten into. I forget that I should be inspiring you, not nagging you. I should be motivating you when I can feel the eyes rolling - "G_d she's at it again."

But is it a habit I am going to remove from my life?

Well - to be honest I'm not sure I want to get rid of this particular habit.

But how do you know if you have a habit - bad or otherwise?

Well a habit is something you do repeatedly and with little or no thought attached to the process.

    * The person who goes to the pub every day after work for a beer
    * The person who lights a cigarette when they walk out of the office building at the end of the day on the way to the car
    * Brushing your teeth
    * Watching a certain program every day
    * Buying a cup of coffee on the way to work every morning
    * Getting up early and going for a run
    * Walking the dog twice a day
    * Making dinner
    * Biting your nails, sucking the end of your pen, chewing the inside of your lip when you are concentrating.

They are all habits. Only "we" can decide if they are habits we are happy to keep or not.

From experience, habits cannot be broken easily - if we do something sub-consciously - it means we have managed to form patterns in our minds, and if we stray from those patterns - the nagging feeling that something isn't quite right forces us back to whatever it was we didn't want to do.

So how do you get rid of habits?

The only way I know of getting rid of any kind of habit is by replacing it with something else. Then repeating those behaviours until they become something we don't have to think about. As in we create a new habit whilst getting rid of a bad one.

Say for instance you have a habit of lighting up a cigarette when you get home from work, and whilst you are relaxing you have a glass of wine.

Now, you decide that you want to stop smoking. Unfortunately your "habit" of having a glass of wine at the same time gets in the way - if you have the wine, your mind says - but what about the cigarette? We "crave" whatever it is we say we don't want. So in this particular case we have to give up both the cigarette and the wine trigger and do something completely different.

Of course what you replace a bad habit (something you no longer want) with a good habit (something you do want) is up to you and as individual as everyone reading this. What may work for one person may not work for another. In the case of the cigarette smoking wine drinker above (and it is a real person - the story was told to me a while back) her and her partner - yes they both had the habit, decided they would walk and talk instead of sit and talk about their days. Well. I don't know anyone who can walk and carry a glass of wine without spilling it, and if you are walking at a reasonable pace, you will have trouble smoking too....eventually they managed to reduce their habit and create another one.

Did it work? As far as I know it did. But that is not the point - the point is - you need to make a conscious decision to break a sub-conscious action.

And yes there is homework attached to this one boys and girls....get out your notebooks

Write down all the things you do - every day
Take today as a good example of a typical day - what did you do - and it is important to get into the details here.

Now take a good look at every single action, and ask - is that a habit I want to keep / need to keep (getting up, getting ready for and going to work etc etc), have tried to get rid of in the past?

For those items you don't want to keep - what can you do to replace it. Bear in mind your mind will find all sorts of ways it can and will play tricks on you.

It's time to make a conscious decision about all your actions and then you can see how much you can change your life.