Putting yourself down because you have become prey to bad habits is not a good thing to do. Everyone in their life falls prey to these habits. However, the person who can accept this mistake and break bad habits emerges as the winner in real life. When you look at your lifestyle, you realize how easy it is to fall prey to a list of bad habits. The difficult part is breaking bad habits and making yourself free from them. The habit of biting your nails or restlessly playing with your hair may sound harmless at first, but these habits become hard to break in the long run. Along with these, certain bad habits are dreadful for your health, like smoking and drinking.
These two habits can lead to cancer and lung disease. The best resort in such a situation is to break these bad habits by following a good routine life. In this article, we have highlighted some bad habits that you need to quit right away! We’ve broken the list up into two parts, hopefully, you were able to take in the first 13 bad habits yesterday because the remaining habits are equally as important.
Bad Habits to Quit Right Away
Bad habits become a part of our life due to the lifestyle we adopt. But, before we take the necessary steps to break these bad habits, the most important thing is to understand which ones are terrible for your life. Let us look at the remainder of these habits below:
14. Sitting Around Waiting for the Perfect Moment to Begin Something
When’s the perfect moment to start planning your dream vacation, clean out your closet or look for that new job? You could spend years upon years waiting for that so-called “perfect moment.” The truth is, the perfect moment is right now. Stop waiting, and start working towards your goals, big and small, professional and personal. You’ll be glad you did!
15. Refusing to Learn Anything New
You can benefit greatly from learning a few new skills or techniques that relate to your everyday work. These skills don’t have to be complicated, they can just be simple, everyday things, such as learning how to touch type, use the photocopier, or resize photographs on your computer.
16. Quitting
“Well, I tried.” Sure, they tried once. That horse is shaking its head and trotting off to find someone who will get back on it. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with cutting losses sometimes. After all, no experience is ever truly wasted, but quitting is the mortal enemy to successful people. If they believe in something, they want to find that success, there is no road map. You may very well have to carve your own path through the treacherous jungle. If they give up the first time a mosquito bites, then they’ve doomed themselves already.
Success, in large part, is about the human being in the arena. People cheer for them, their struggle and victory, but the person who watches idly and scoffs, having never tried has also never really lived.
17. Being in Bad Relationships
Certain people want to be in a relationship to cling to someone. This is a very bad thing. If you are in a bad relationship and do not want to end it, it will consume every inch of your body. Even when you wish to break this bad habit, it will want to cling to you. Hence, it is always better to understand that you cannot change someone. If you experience being in a bad relationship, the best thing to do is end it immediately. By prolonging it further, you damage yourself and reduce your chances of being with your soulmate. Learn about why you shouldn’t stay in a bad relationship and how to deal with it if you’re in one.
18. Hanging out with Naysayers
It is often said that you are as good as your company. Hence, it is always recommended to make friends with people who are positive thinkers. But, there comes a time in life when you befriend negative people who have a habit of saying no to everything. This can actually ruin your life in the long run. The reason being, the company you keep, makes you the same person. Hence, it is always recommended to avoid naysayers as they pollute your mind and take you on the wrong path. It is therefore recommended to make friends with positive-minded people.
19. Watching Too Much TV
When we were kids, there were many things that we could play outdoors. But, with time, we are seeing children being stuck on TV sets because they have nothing much to do. This has made them become couch potatoes. This bad habit of watching too much TV can make you sit idle, make you lazy and obese, and ultimately prey to diseases like diabetes. The best thing to counter this bad habit is by ensuring that you walk outdoors daily and have a set time to switch on the TV during the day.
20. Stress Eating
We live in an age where every person, whether studying or working, has some or other stress. But, when you try to counter this stress by overeating, it becomes a bad habit that needs to be cut out from your life. Stress eating results in excessive eating of food that we sometimes intake because we are occupied with the tension in our minds. This makes us eat without thinking which can make us obese and even result in diabetes. The best resort to counter this bad habit is never eating while watching the television. Also, do not overthink while eating. Put your thought process to digest the food in front of you.
21. Regularly Skipping Meals
You need food – and water – to survive. Period. If you’re not eating meals on a regular basis, you’re probably not being as productive as you could be. Don’t skip meals in lieu of working and be sure to take your full meal breaks. While you’re at it, get away from your desk or workspace and eat somewhere else, like a cafeteria, outdoors or in a public park for a break from the office.
22. Having an Unhealthy Diet
Junk food has become part and parcel of our life nowadays. For example, if both parents have started working in a family, the kids may often result to eating junk food and drinking diet soda, which can adversely affect their health. This is a very bad habit that can be difficult to break due to the cultural shift we are experiencing today. The best resort to deal with this bad habit is by ensuring that everyone eats homemade food all the time. This can ensure that each individual’s health in the family is protected. No one becomes obese, which is a curse as it can result in diabetes and other fatal diseases. If you think, “Hey, but junk food is tasty!” think again: A study by Paul Johnson and Paul Kenny suggests that junk food consumption alters brain activity in a way similar to addictive drugs like cocaine and heroin.
23. Nail Biting
This is yet another bad habit that we have been guilty of pursuing since our early childhood. In adolescence, when someone shouts at us or we cannot do things according to our wishes, unnecessary stress makes us subconsciously eat our nails, which is a bad habit. The reason is that the nails that you bite get accumulated in your stomach, which can cause damage at later stages of your life. The best resort to deal with this bad habit is to dip your finger in something bitter to stop your craving to bite your nails. Not only is nail-biting unhygienic, but it is also socially repelling, leads to dental problems like malocclusion of the anterior teeth, potentially causes stomach problems, and leads to severely deformed fingernails in the long run.
People who bite their nails tend to have shorter nails than the average person; their nail plates also experience scarring and may eventually become absent. Understand what triggers your nail-biting behavior and replace it with another neutral to a positive habit.
24. Smoking
Smoking is one of the leading causes of preventable death globally. When we were kids, our parents never encouraged us even to go closer to smokers. The reason is that even passive smoking is dangerous for health. As we grow older and befriend other smokers, they entice us to pursue smoking which is a bad habit. It can have a bad effect on your health and even cause cancer. Hence, it is always suggested to stay away from this bad habit of smoking. Whenever you feel like craving to smoke, the best thing to do is put a pack of chewing gum in your mouth. This will stop your bad habit of smoking. Gender-wise, male and female smokers lose an average of 13.2 and 14.5 years of life respectively — that’s over a decade of life right there. Not only that, smoking causes pre-mature skin aging (i.e. wrinkles), yellowing of teeth, bad breath, and worse of all — jeopardy to the health of people around you, including your loved ones. Studies have shown that non-smokers exposed to second-hand smoke are at risk for many of the health problems associated with direct smoking.
25. Excessive Drinking
In the fast-paced era we live in, people start the bad habit of excessive drinking to deal with competitiveness. Drinking a couple of packs of hard drinks is not a bad thing for health. But, if you indulge in excessive drinking, it can damage your liver. You can become addicted to drinking in the long run, which is not a good thing for your lifestyle.
According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, drinking too much — be it on a single occasion or over time — can seriously damage your health:
- Brain problems: Alcohol interferes with the brain’s communication pathways, making it harder to think clearly and move with coordination.
- Heart diseases: Cardiomyopathy – stretching and drooping of the heart muscle, arrhythmias – irregular heartbeat, stroke, high blood pressure.
- Liver diseases: Steatosis or fatty liver, alcoholic hepatitis, fibrosis, cirrhosis
- Pancreas problems: Pancreatitis is a dangerous inflammation and swelling of the blood vessels in the pancreas that prevents proper digestion.
- Different types of cancer: mouth, esophagus, throat, liver, breast.
If need be, seek help from an AA group — you aren’t alone in this. Change starts from today.
Bonus: Bad Habits That Hold You Back From Succeeding in Life
1. Failing to Hold a Vision
If you don’t know where you’re going, you will never arrive. Success means holding to a vision of what you want. Just saying “I have an idea” isn’t going to make anything happen. You have to be specific and intentional about what you want. Without a vision to pull you into the future, you’re likely to keep reverting to the past.
2. Unclear Goals
A vision without a plan is just a wish. So many clients come to me with strong ideas and a clear vision, but the problem is they don’t have a clue about how to achieve them. You have to define your goals if you’re going to meet them. As the saying goes, a goal is a dream with an action plan.
3. Inaction
So you have a well-defined idea, a vision, and clear goals in place–but until you take action, you haven’t really started. You must take action to succeed. It is that simple. Ditch the habit of procrastinating, of waiting for the perfect moment, of trying to plan for every contingency. If there’s one thing successful people share, it’s the ability to take the leap into action. They know the importance of organizing and planning, but they also know that action is what makes things happen.
4. Feeding the Monkey Mind
When your mind is overactive, it’s hard to even put two thoughts together, let alone accomplish anything. When you feed distractions and overstimulation–the monkey mind–it will interfere with every plan and goal. If you find yourself leaping from one thought to another with little control, slow down your breathing. Spend some time in meditation, prayer, or focused thought. Force yourself to do one thing at a time, and learn to calm yourself with repetitive tasks that lead you toward your goal.
5. Satisfaction with the Status Quo
If you want to stay where you are and keep getting what you’re getting, by all means, allow yourself to be content and comfortable. But to succeed, you have to let yourself become uncomfortable with the status quo by taking a risk and doing something daring.
6. Lack of Motivation
The best motivation always comes from within; you cannot change what is going on around you until you start changing what is going on within you. If you lack motivation, find the fire within yourself. It will be your determination and commitment, your desire to do your best and work hard, that will enable you to attain the success you seek. The harder you work for something, the greater you will feel when you achieve it.
Begin today to ditch the things that are pulling you down and build the positive habits that will lead you toward your success.
Article Credit: https://www.lollydaskal.com/leadership/5-terrible-habits-that-hold-you-back-from-success/ https://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/bad-habits-quit.html
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