A lot of people promise themselves every year that they will eat healthier or quit smoking, but only some people succeed. Much of it depends on motivation, belief in success, and persistence in achieving your goals. You can achieve a lot by changing your habits, if you really want to. And you don’t have to wait until next year with your resolutions.
Before giving some tips on how to achieve the intended goal, it’s worth mentioning in a nutshell what motivation is, according to psychology. Because it’s motivation that contributes a lot to success and winona.
What Is Motivation
According to psychologists, motivation is all the mechanisms responsible for the activation, direction, maintenance and termination of certain behavior.
Types of motivation can be divided into:
- External motivation, when a person acts under the influence of the environment, when the source of the force forcing him to act comes from outside. External motivation is associated with a system of penalties and rewards, for example, when an employee works for a reward, a user bets at 22Bet TZ for generous bonuses, a student studies for grades.
- Intrinsic motivation, when a person performs a given action for pleasure, gets joy from the action itself, its content, satisfying some internal need.
As you know, appetite grows with food, so if externally motivated people receive a reward, such as a promotion, it encourages them to work even harder and more intensely. It’s the same with intrinsic motivation – if a person learns for their own knowledge, based on an intrinsic need, then after mastering some skills they are happy to start acquiring new ones.
In the end, intrinsic motivation is undoubtedly better because it does not involve rewards from the outside. With intrinsic motivation, one can move mountains and certainly change undesirable habits.
What Are Those Habits?
It’s not as easy as it seems at first glance. The first thing to understand is, what is a habit?
Simply put, it’s some kind of automatic operation developed through exercise and experience. An example would be when someone offers a cigarette while one is drinking coffee, or simply watching the news at breakfast. When this exercise has a positive effect, the person repeats it, i.e., always watching the news over morning coffee. Over time it’s no longer a conscious decision, an automatic action. So, habits are also characterized by low awareness. If one does something for several years, one stops focusing on, for example, what gear to choose when driving a car or how to do a certain job. It’s the brain’s way of saving energy.
Moreover, habits never go away, they cannot be forgotten, and the neural connections created can be activated even years later. But habits can be changed, replaced, and there are methods for this.
How to Change a Habit
First, motivation is important. To increase motivation, you can:
- Analyze the goal.
- Use your imagination to visualize the goal.
- Set smaller goals that lead to the main goal.
- Start with simple tasks.
- Reward yourself for tasks completed.
- Share with others what action you have decided to take.
To change habits, you need to activate your motivation – to imagine the outcome.
It takes intrinsic, deep motivation to change a habit – that’s for sure. But it’s worth it.
Taking on such a challenge also requires focusing on what externally triggers the habitual behavior, and avoiding situations that promote a return to habitual activity. However, this is usually difficult without changing the environment, such as among people who smoke cigarettes. Therefore, a good time for a change is holidays or a move.
Habits are actions that are performed automatically. To start fighting them, you need to restore your decision-making process by increasing self-control and, above all, by analyzing your habit loop.
Change your habits in 3 steps:
Step 1. Analyze the circumstances of the habit, including:
- What triggers the habit?
- What is the time of day for the habitual activity?
- In what place does the habit occur, in what situation?
Step 2. Consider what the reward or benefit would be as a result of the changed behavior.
Step 3. Think of a behavior that could replace the habit with a new, healthy one.
