Changing or replacing a bad habit is hard, time-consuming work that might not pan out. Right? You’ve tried to do it before so you already know that by the third or fourth week, or maybe two months from now, you’ll be back to square one.
But will you, really? The process of changing a habit certainly creates new neural pathways in our brains. Each time we successfully move toward the new habit and away from the old one, those paths get stronger.
The problem is that it doesn’t happen as fast as we’d like. We become impatient because we want the change to happen now. We forget that in all likelihood the bad habit (though easier to pick up perhaps) still took time to take root.
A habit is something we basically do without effort or much thought. It’s like driving your car, riding a bike, getting dressed or any other behavior that we repeatedly do. It takes time for the habit to become second nature, and for some habits, it takes upwards of five years (Pro-Change, 2018).
Patient, steady persistence will get you where you want to go with your new habit. Will it be easy? Nope. But nothing worth having or changing is typically easy to have or do.
You will stumble. You will get tired. And then you’ll pick yourself back up, remember why you want to change that bad habit, and in the immortal words of Walt Disney, “keep moving forward.”
References:
Pro-Change (2018). The Transtheoretical Model. Retrieved from https://www.prochange.com/transtheoretical-model-of-behavior-change November 30, 2018.
