Put yourself in the shoes of your friend Paul for a second, who can’t stop biting his nails every time a commercial comes on the TV. Or, dive deep within the thought process of your coworker Sarah, who is helplessly addicted to cigarettes and always carries a pack on her regardless of time/space. Or, even catch your brother Matt at his best procrastination spell, delaying important jobs till the very last minute.

What do you observe?

A particularly stubborn string of habitual behaviors, or repetitive tendencies that lead to a certain amount of destructiveness in the host individuals.

In other words, bad habits. And, lord knows, we’ve all got a handful of those afflicting us at present.

Well, a new year has dawned, bringing a new sense of responsibility and a fresh chance at life. Are we just going to let it slip away by continuing to carry our toxic baggage with us through 2019? Or, are we going to take a solid step in the direction of overcoming this load of bad habits? If you, my dear reader, have selected the second possibility yet don’t know where to even get started, then, you’ve come to the right place.

This article will give you some of the best no-nonsense tips to throw those bad habits out the window. Remember, only you can undertake this journey of self- cleansing. So, get started today instead of tomorrow.

Invest in an Inventory

Oftentimes, bad habits are so deeply ingrained in our daily routine that we do not even remember doing them in the first place. The only way to undo this chaotic automation is by undergoing a rigorous self-evaluation.

In other words, make yourself your own subject of study.

Observe what you do from day to day, right when you wake up and right before you hit the bed. Compose a list of repetitive activities with corresponding times. Color-code it for strategizing effectively. Mark the good habits to ‘keep’ in green, the bad ones to ‘kill’ in red, and the medium ones to ‘change’ in blue. You may check out the tutorials to make such a list over Windstream online. This inventory will do wonders, trust me.

Curb the Cue

To banish bad habits, you need to figure out how they work and maintain such a strong hold on you. It is a cue-based system, to be honest. Certain insignificant things trigger the habit into motion. These can be anything from a color, a smell, a sound, to a proper gesture. Once you’re affected with the cue, an internal craving begins to arise which impels you to undertake that habitual action automatically.

So, the primary method to curb the habit is to kill the cue and replace it with a better one.

For instance, if a red colored object on your bedside table reminds you of your cigarette pack and ‘inspires’ you to smoke first thing in the morning, then you need to take care of it. Remove the object from your sight and replace it with a lemon water bottle. This way with a gradual minus-plus cue regime, you may be able to overcome old bad habits and take up new healthy ones.

Take a Vacay

Sometimes, the impulse is too strong to control no matter how efficiently you handle the habit triggers. It is perfectly normal. Happens to everyone. What you need to do in this case is change the scenario. Extricate yourself from the familiar environment and spend some time in an unfamiliar locale. In other words, I suggest you take a vacation to a non-orthodox destination, allow the new routine to settle in, and see how miraculously your bad habits disappear.

In conclusion, if you wish to overcome your bad habits and fulfill your New Year’s resolutions, then do try the aforementioned measures that have proven to be pretty effective so far. Let me know how your reformatory journey goes.

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