Do Habits Work? How Your Habits Relate to Your Willpower

One of the most difficult habits to break is smoking. Smoking is such a deeply rooted habit that it requires lots of will power and belief to be able to quit. Many people find that it is not an easy habit to give up, even with the help of the right kind of support system. Even if all your efforts are heading somewhere, you may find that you simply don’t have the willpower to quit smoking and will go back to smoking, often in much the same way as you started.

There are many different habits that we tend to repeat every day without thinking, but most people would identify smoking as one of these habits. A habit is basically a pattern of repeated behaviour and tends to take place unconsciously. If you start to notice that you are becoming more engaged in the same routine each day you will begin to notice a change in your own behaviour. The only difference is that now you have the willpower to keep going with it.

The main issue here is that most of our bad habits involve nicotine and caffeine in the form of a cigarette or cup of coffee every day. It is this one craving in particular that needs to be tackled head on, because if you don’t deal with it you will be unable to give up your bad habits. The suggested read you will find below deals with all aspects of coping with that single craving and also dealing with the underlying reasons why you crave. In addition there is information regarding why you need to stop smoking naturally.

The main thing to remember when it comes to stopping bad habits is that the craving is triggered by a particular trigger. This can be anything, for example a person might get a craving for a particular brand of potato chips each time they eat a packet of cigarettes. The problem is that the specific trigger has to be dealt with. If you eat a packet of chips every day for example, then you will be well aware of the fact that you must stop doing this, because it is the trigger which triggers the craving. When you address the trigger and replace it with another routine, such as making a cup of tea or chewing sugarless gum, then the habit will soon be gone.

The second suggested read below deals with the second most important aspect of dealing with habits and this is to make sure that the rituals you do every day fit in with the way that your brain works. It is through the prefrontal cortex that we decide on our habits and so the rules governing how these habits are to be acted upon are laid down in the pulp of the cerebrum. You see, your habits form due to the pathway in your brain which connects your frontal cortex with the rest of your body. If a part of the routine becomes unbalanced due to changes to your brain chemistry, then you are likely to fall into a bad habit. For example, if your routine involves checking your email rather than performing some other task, you are less likely to do your job effectively, simply because the email check out seemed like an unimportant step which needed to be skipped.

So, the answer to do habits work is yes. However, having the will power to act on these changes means that you need to get control of your emotions, which, in many cases, are easily angered by even the smallest things. The good news is that you don’t have to try and consciously force yourself to change, if you are in a habit that you really do not enjoy, then the temptation is there to skip out. Just take a deep breath and continue with your ritual, knowing full well that you have the power in your hands to stop at any time. With the right mind set, you can overcome any obstacle put in front of you.