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January 02, 2008

The Five Second Program for Breaking Bad Habits!

The Turn Around Choice from The North Star Mental Fitness Program Is a Five Second Program for Breaking Bad Habits!

Yes, you read the statement right.  You can break bad habits, if you are willing to take five seconds out of your day when needed to break your bad habit!

Impossible you might think, but from my personal experience I know it works.  This simplistic and easy, but still unbelievably effective works, because of the unique understanding of how to break bad habits.

Here is the secret.

All bad habits are caused by and triggered by an urge. Control the urge and you control the bad habit.

This understanding of how to break bad habits is a lot different than most other approaches.  With the "control the urge approach" it is much easier, because you don't have to:

  1. Keep a record of when the bad habit occurred, what you are feeling at the time or what was occurring at the time the bad habit surfaced.
  2. Understand the underlying motivation or causation for the bad habit.
  3. Analyze one's past history for clues to understand the bad habit.
  4. Work out a replacement plan to replace the bad habit.
  5. Worry, be fearful of relapse or plan for relapse prevention.
  6. Avoid people, places or things associated with the bad habit.
  7. Attend a support group.
  8. You don't need a reworking of your personality dynamics before you can become successful in breaking your habit.
  9. You don't have have to feel helpless and impotent before you can be successful.
  10. You don't have to take a psychological or moral inventory of yourself.
  11. You don't have to make amends.
  12. You don't have to think of your "bad habit" as bad; just think of it as a habit.

Now many of these qualities are nice and certainly could improve the quality of people's lives, but they are not necessary for breaking bad habits.

Let me return to the basic hypothesis that you can control the bad habit and, in reality, eliminate it by managing the urge.  Notice I did not say "destroy" the urge.  The goal is to manage the urge.

Once you have learned a cognitive way to manage one urge and you have confidence in your solution, you then don't have to be afraid of future bad urges. 

Your life will become much more simple and easy.  Whenever you have an urge, you can manage the urge with your cognitive, learned and satisfying thought process.  An urge can be managed in five seconds with The Turn Around Choice.  You can manage the urge in any and all situations in only five seconds.

It is not hard to figure out the urge for bad behavior.  Bad behavior is motivated by the same, compatible, bed urge.  For example, my success with The Turn Around Choice was with breaking my bad habit of smoking.  Smoking was the bad behavior and the urge was my determination to smoke. 

My determination to smoke was a manifestation of the "innate human defiance," which was identified as one of the reasons people can't break bad habits in the article written by Jeanna Bryner for FoxNews.com.  Her article was entitled "Why It's so Hard to Break Bad Habits".

As members of support groups know, it is very important to accept one's bad behavior or manifestations of "innate human defiance".  Then, as indicated by Nancy Schimelpfening from About.com, it is important to make conscious choices to engage in bad habits or the payoff for not engaging in a bad behavior.  Her blog was entitled "Bad Choices, Bad Habits".

Attentive repetition of the cognitive thought process crafted to manage urges causing bad habits will be like the wonderful statement by Todd from We the Change in his article,  "How to Break Out Of Bad Habits by Using Affirmations".  Todd wrote "Remember the repetition of consistent words affects your subconscious mind and slowly shifts the underlying current of your life to the intended direction".

This is a brief outline of the five second solution for breaking bad habits.  This approach is outlined in The Turn Around Choice.  This choice is part of The North Star Mental Fitness Program's system for helping people actualize themselves.  If I can be of help with you in applying this technique, please e-mail me.

Remember, We Live within the Environment Created by Our Choices!

Dr. Hal

Life and Mental Fitness Coach

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Comments

There are moments in our life that we pause for a minute and are confronted with the decision on whether to give in or to turn away from the temptation. Most of the time, we give in and make promises to break the habit next time. And even if you do choose to turn away, it's not really enough of a guarantee that you won't suffer from a relapse. It's important to take concrete steps them to address your issues.

Great post. I was reading a similar topic on thedailyskinny.com that went
into how to lose belly fat first and why certain types of foods and exercise
aren't really as effective as most people would like to believe. Thanks
again for the info

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