Living a healthy life is all about instilling a series of healthy habits into your daily routine which are good and unique to your body. We all hear about how to create healthy habits to help you live well and feel great, but what about the unhealthy habits, how do we break them?
We all have bad habits that we would like to lose, but these can be difficult to break. Unhealthy habits can be subjective, something that feels negative to one person may seem like a positive behaviour. However, there are also those unhealthy habits that are simply black and white such as smoking – we all know how damaging this is to our health. Whether you want to give up smoking or cut your refined sugar intake, changing these negative behaviour patterns can have a major impact on your health and well-being for the better.
Here are top 5 tips to help you beat your unhealthy habits, hopefully for good:
Start at the beginning and find out what triggers these unhealthy habits
Listening to our bodies and understanding what causes us to make certain choices is the best place to start when you are thinking about making a change. Identifying key triggers that make you behave a certain way is the key to breaking them, especially because most of the time we repeat unhealthy habits without even knowing why we are doing them.
Go steady & make small changes
Forming new habits is the easy part, but breaking old habits is much harder. Although we want to end our bad habits right away, the best way to make sure that we maintain positive behaviors is to make small changes and work our way up. Rather than trying to change the world in one day, start small and be gentle with yourself. For example, if you’re trying to cut your refined sugar intake try to reduce the quantities that you use or eat rather than cut it out completely. This means that you’re more likely to make a positive change and not fall back into unhealthy habits again.
Keep a Healthy Habits Tracker
Writing things down gives them more permanence and makes them feel more official. Keep a journal or writing down your progress with your new healthy habits lets you see where you can make improvements and celebrate any breakthroughs. Also, who doesn’t like writing in a super pretty notebook?
Change Your Mindset About Your Unhealthy Habits
When we’re so used to making unhealthy or bad habits for our body we usually see them as a positive thing, like providing comfort or making us feel happy. Try and turn your mindset on its head about these unhealthy habits by thinking about them in a negative way and how much better you are going to feel without them in your life.
Punishment For Your Unhealthy Habits
Money is a fabulous motivator for making us do things, so a fine jar is a brilliant idea to help you combat your unhealthy habits. Each time you or someone else catches you slipping up, put some money into the ‘fine jar’ as a punishment. Equally, you should reward yourself for your good behaviour for sticking to your healthy habits.
As I previously mentioned, breaking an unhealthy habit is harder to achieve than starting up. It’s all about taking each day as it comes and making small steps in the right direction. The most important thing is to just start and slowly and even though you may meet some stumbling blocks on the way, you’ve already set those healthy wheels in motion.
I have definitely found that tracking my healthy habits, like working our or not eating out so much, has really worked wonders for me. I need to try more of these tips though!
– Elodie x
http://www.elle-yeah.com
I’m using tracking at the moment and finding it so helpful.
I probably have lots of unhealthy habits that need addressing. The small changes tip is one is agree with, it makes change feel less daunting!
Totally! Taking baby steps makes it seem more achievable.
The use of jars is pretty brilliant! Great tips here 🙂
Great tips! I have lots of unhealthy habits which i need to break so will defintiely be taking these tips on board. I think its all about having the right mindset which i don’t have right now x
So true, mindset is definitely a massive part of this.
I love these tips especially the use of a diary to help keep motivated!
Thanks Nikki!
Thank you for sharing! Im in a dont-eat-sugar-week, and I want to keep that mindset after this week’s done as well!
I hope your challenge is going well.
I have lots of unhealthy habits. Also, I think I am addicted to sugar. I am about to start a program to cut sugar out completely. I love all your suggestions and tips here.
I hope your program is a success for you.
I needed this today, I think this is a great post, I like to jot things down and actually went out and got a notebook earlier for journalling.
Thanks hun! So great to hear that you found it helpful.
I definitely want to change my eating habits! These are great tips and I’m going to use them to help me! ☺️
Thanks, Paighton!
Hello! I agree to your post.
If we need bigger change, gradually we need to make efforts to change our habits. And it doesn’t happen for just a snap. Quitting our bad vibes (example vibes on eating junk foods) we need to minimize our junk food consumption, then eventually removing it to our system. That way. we don’t have a subconscious guilt for the change. 🙂
For Urban Women
Thanks, Blair! I really like your approach and thinking behind it.
Loads of great tips here. And hey, any excuse to buy a pretty new notebook!
Ha! Not that I need any excuses to buy new one. 🙂
I’ve never thought about tracking healthy habits, only the negative ones so I would always avoid it! I’m going to have to start tracking my positive choices, going to bed early, not eating doughnuts for breakfast, finishing my homework on time, etc. and then perhaps I’ll be more motivated to break the bad habits!
It works really well to help keep them up and I think it’s such a positive thing to have in your day.
I am trying to work at being patient with myself during the process! But have started to implement changes, so guess that’s good!Great tips!
Let me know how you’re getting on with your changes. Would love to hear about your progress.
I need to do this! I do have a step tracker at least. And I try to drink more water.
Love that you wrote this! 🙂 Great post … I especially agree with the tip about keeping a healthy habits tracker. I’m such a sucker for making lists, and graphs, and charts … and having special little notebooks for things. It just works for me to have a plan all laid out on paper about my exercise goals for the week, or to write down on my calendar how many calories I ate every day. I need to see things visually.
Thanks, great to hear that you enjoyed the post. 🙂 I’m a sucker for writing things down to, so this tip works really well for me.
Wow.. so many great tips! I have so many bad habits and i am working on it.. writing down in a dairy is a good way to track your yourself !
Yes, writing it down is a great way to keep track.
I have a lot of unhealthy habits linked to eating and sleeping which I really need to change. Great post.
Thank you! I think they are probably my areas of concern too.
It can be so difficult to break bad habits. These are great tips, and I love the quote about progress, not perfection.
That is one of my favourite quotes of all time!
I definitely agree about writing things down. There are so many things we do unconsciously! It’s good to hold ourselves accountable too.
So true, it makes all the difference when you put the effort in and try and be accountable.
Ooh I love the idea of a punishment jar, like a swear box to stop those naughty words x
Money is a massive motivator and it could work really well to help break some bad habits.
Great tips here, so thank you for sharing! I have a few unhealthy habits that I need to sort out – so I will be using your methods! I like the idea of making small changes – as it seems less daunting. I will have to purchase a new pretty notebook to keep track! 🙂 x
I’m definitely trying to be more healthy but my major bad habit is forgetting breakfast,
I need to save this post for later when I need a little more motivation!
Jemma I so need to work on getting healthy. The money is a great motivator like when you lose weight to buy new clothes.
I need to break unhealthy habits. I think starting sugar reduction in my diet is a good start.
I need to start tracking these asap I think I would really help!
These are some brilliant tips! I usually write evertything down in my notebook
Great tips, I am making little changes, rather than great big changes. I find that so much easier to achieve at.
I really agree with the making small changes. I find making small changes a little at a time works much better than sudden changes and then reverting back to unhealthy ways.
This is a great post. I needed some inspiration to cut bad habits! Your tips really helped point me in the right direction!
I really needed to read this as I’m about to try to break some of my bad habbits! xxx
Great tips shared! I totally believe with you that small and steady changes do make a difference!
I definitely think gradual, small changes are the way to make real progress that you can keep up for the rest of your life.
At home I always ate quite unhealthy if we had that sort of food in but since I’ve moved out and haven’t bought those things, I’ve been doing really well so I find if it’s not there, I won’t eat it!
Great tips, i’m sure I have lots of unhealthy habits, I just never seem to have the time to work out how to change them!
I think I try to go into breaking my bad habits without thinking about them and what trigers them and I think this is why I always flat on my face. These are really good tips Jemma
We used to get take aways twice a week. Then a year ago we changed that to once a week. Lately that even has changed. I forgot about the take away nights and have something very small which I suppose is not good either.
I definitely need to follow these tips! My diet is horrendous, but struggling as a sugar addict…