 |  |
FOR EXAMPLE, SOMEONE WHO is accustomed to going to fast food every weekend can well replace this habit by cooking good things at home, and eventually invite friends. It's both friendlier and 100 times better for your health!
A smoker can initially switch to the electronic cigarette to stop drinking all the toxic products in the cigarette. The smoker will keep his smoking habits, so he will not miss it. He can then gradually decrease his doses of nicotine, until the day when he can completely replace this habit with a new one hour of sports per day and every desire to smoke, do 5 minutes of exercise.
In 2009, researchers at the NIH (National Institutes of Health) asked a panel of 1,600 obese people to note everything they ate during the day, every day. This simple habit allowed them to:
› Quickly identify problems
› Find better alternatives for health
The result? Six months after the beginning of this experiment, all the people who kept a daily diary listing everything they ate lost twice as much weight as those who gave up the idea. The interesting part of this study is that the researchers did not ask the participants anything else, nor did they promulgate any tips for losing weight. They understood by themselves what was wrong, just by adopting this new habit.
Most diets to lose weight do not work in the long run because they want to be too strict. If a diet tells you to eat that, do that, do X- hours of sports a day, stop taking the escalator or elevator to take the stairs instead, how long do you think? We all end up letting go of the case after a few weeks, to the point of returning to its routine and gaining even more weight.
Adopting a single good habit, which is replaced by a bad one, can drastically change the situation. It will only be clearly ineffective and too pretentious to try to change everything in your life overnight, even with the best will.
Take Action
Once you have grasped the concept of habits and its importance, both to improve your personal and professional life, you can:
› List your bad habits
› Understand how they are triggered: what determining element makes you act (the sight, smell, a specific moment in the day)
› What are the "rewards": how you feel when you finish this action?
Then:
Find new habits that must be triggered instead of the bad ones and that must bring similar rewards. Keep in mind not to change everything overnight, for example, changing 5 bad habits at the same time may be too radical and will cause you to give up quickly.
Just as big buildings start with small stones, big changes start with small habits!