Article about fixing bad habits from the99percent.com

[Korn]

Fix Bad Habits: Insights from a 7-Year Obsession



An excerpt:

We all have lousy habits. Things we’d like to do, or know we should, but just don’t seem to happen: exercise, diet, productivity or flossing longer than a week after the visit to the dentist.
In that sense, I’m like most people - still a work in progress.

But, unlike most people, I’ve had on ongoing obsession with figuring out how to fix those lousy habits. I've spent thousands of hours being an experimental guinea pig, uncovering surprising findings, such as:
Implementing a daily exercise plan is easier than exercising 3 times per week
Changing 10 meals will change 90% of your eating habits
Learning a new skill or language can be accomplished with 5 minutes a day

I don’t expect most people to replicate my, perhaps unhealthy, obsession with self-experimentation. Instead, I want you to save years of trial and error so that you can fix bad habits without frustration.

Continued here.

[khadagan]

I enjoyed reading your article. I never really think about creating new habits and how to sustain them and to why it's hard to start new habits. I think there's definately a good point in making a new habit, like exercise, into a daily habit, so it's easier to keep doing. I found this true for myself as well.

About quiting a bad habit, this is something I have put some thought into and I feel it's better to not look for anything to fill that gap or replace it with another action. Otherwise I feel that you change it into just another dependency. It's best to eradicate whatever it is from you life and don't look back. If the urge comes back to you I remind myself that I no longer do this or that because I've decided to do this for a reason. Same perhaps as with when I changed to veganism. I stopped thinking about replacing certain foods with others, instead I chose a better life for myself and those whom I affect with my actions or their lifes affecting mine in a way I was unhappy about.

[vegetarian_cat]

"Changing 10 meals will change 90% of your eating habits" Very interesting and useful info Korn.