Today’s post is a guest blog written by Farouk Radwan, founder of 2KnowMySelf.   Farouk’s been a long time blog reader and has great insights on personal improvement.  Enjoy!

Most of the actions that we do on daily basis are nothing more habits that we got used to. Washing your face as soon as you wake up is considered a habit, checking your facebook while working is another habit, and getting angry when someone annoys you is a third habit.

As you can see our lives are governed by habits to a great extent whether they are good or bad.  Bad habits can not only ruin your life, but they contribute to feelings of shame and guilt, thus reducing your chance to live a happy life.

Because of these reasons I decided to write this post to tell you how to break these bad habits:

1. Avoid triggers, not the habit: People feel like doing a bad habit when something reminds them of it. Let’s suppose that you want to quit drinking.  In this case avoiding places where most people drink will prevent the thoughts that led to the bad habit from being triggered.  Most people make the mistake of not avoiding the triggers that lead to the bad habits, and that’s why they have a hard time quitting them.
2. Change your life style: Let’s suppose you  want to break the bad habit of overeating.  If you discovered that you watch tv for 6 hours a day and that this habit contributes to your eating habit, then you need to reduce watching TV. Changing your lifestyle is one of the most effective methods for breaking bad and unwanted habits.
3. Use the power of intention: Once you decide to break a habit, write the decision down. Writing down your goals is one of the best methods to install them directly in the subconscious mind. The power of intention will motivate you to break the habit in a much easier way because it will give you a strong push on the unconscious level.
4. Know the root cause: Many people fail to break bad habits because they never target the real root cause behind them. For example if a person smokes whenever he feels stressed, then he needs to learn how to deal with stress and his smoking habit will disappear on its own. If you attempted to break a bad habit without targeting its root cause, you will always find yourself returning back to it even if you managed to quit it for a while.
5. Watch your thoughts: Before you feel like eating a delicious cake you will first have to visualize it in your mind. In other words, your thoughts turn into actions. Thus if you managed to monitor your thoughts and prevent them from taking certain u-turns, then you will certainly be able to break habits more easily.

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