Human In Progress: How I Am Breaking My Bad Habits

Like the majority of people, I have many bad habits. Some are more severe than others, but nonetheless they are all ingrained in my daily life. Normally, I would make a New Year’s Resolution in hopes of creating some new habits. Rather than place confidence in the idea that creating new habits will make me a higher functioning human being, I decided to break some of the tendencies I have that make me dysfunctional instead. This seemed more realistic, accomplishable, and healthy. Adding new habits to a daily routine makes no difference if you are still practicing the old ones. So for the past month and a half I have tackled some of my most exhausting poor patterns. I have entirely broken some, and others I am still working on. My more realistic expectations of myself for 2020 are to be constantly in progress. I’m attempting to not fixate my energy on any specific goal, but rather to make headway on new healthy patterns more and more every day. 

Phone Addiction

I am a major culprit of phone addiction. For years, it has been the first thing I look at in the morning and the last thing I look at before bed. My phone had become my coping mechanism for any boredom during the day. I tended to fill blank space in my day with Instagram, Twitter, Tik-Tok, and Candy Crush. I noticed this to be one of my most relentless bad habits. This one is hard to tackle when everyone around you uses their phones heavily and you rely on it for many essential activities. Communication, email, and the news are all things that my phone is easily used for. To tackle this habit, I knew it would take some reconfiguration of accomplishing my needs that I would normally rely on my phone for, and some sheer will power. I used to sleep with my phone either right next to me or even in my bed. This exemplifies my clear attachment and reliance on my phone. To break this habit, I started charging my phone at my desk at night. This meant it was away from my bed and out of reach, keeping me from using it right up until the time I went to sleep. Added to this, I started to turn it off while I was sleeping. I found that if I got a notification and I was still somewhat awake, I would immediately reach for the phone. I now try to turn my phone off at least 30 mins before I would like to be asleep and put it away. Now my second problem was the desire to reach for my phone first thing in the morning, whether it was to check my email, Twitter, my messages, or the news. Instead of this, I began showering in the morning. Now, the first thing I do is hop in the shower and get dressed. Once I am completely ready for my day, I turn on my phone and check all of my notifications. As far as using my phone throughout the day, that was a harder habit to attack. Instead of checking email on my phone every ten minutes, I now check my email in the morning, once at the beginning of each class, and right before I shut off my phone for the night. I have also tried to check my emails on my laptop more than my phone. This makes it more infrequent and makes me less likely to check it compulsively throughout the day. I also try to only check the news in the morning once and then not again for the rest of the day. I usually fail this one. Mostly because it is election season and I am attached to CNN at the hip. As far as social media, I still spend a good portion of my day scrolling through Instagram or Tik-Tok, but I try to spend less of my time doing that when I am with other people. I try to keep my attention on conversations during meals, and try to not use it to solve my boredom. This is still hard, but I have seen great success with my phone habits at the beginning and end of my day. In the end, it has really helped my sleep. 

Bad Sleep

Now coincidentally, this bad habit seemed to be linked to the previous one. I am notorious among my friends and family for getting either no sleep or very poor sleep. I am always tired, I enjoy a good nap, and I have very poor sleep habits. My phone seemed to be the proponent of most of this. When I stopped looking at my phone right before and after sleep, I found I consequently got more sleep. I spent less time drifting off to scrolling through Instagram and actually fell asleep quicker. In return, when I woke up, I actually had gotten better sleep. In addition, not starting my day with my phone led to me feeling refreshed and not as tired throughout the day. In addition to the phone, I had poor habits around getting ready for bed. I often fell asleep in my regular clothes, on top of my covers, and with the lights on. None of this made for a restful night’s sleep, and also caused me to wake up frequently in the middle of the night. Now, every night I make sure to plug in and turn off my phone, put on comfortable clothes, and get under the covers with the lights off. This makes sure I get a decent night’s sleep. Since the beginning of January and the adoption of these new patterns, I went from getting five unrestful hours of sleep to at least eight fulfilling hours each night. 

Online Shopping

Since coming to college I have found that my willingness to online shop all the time has increased. It is so easy to buy things and have them delivered in two days. One-click order on Amazon has gotten the best of me too many times. I would often buy things and return them within the week. This habit I have actually managed to completely get rid of. Instead of just buying something online whenever I feel like it, I challenge myself to keep the item in my cart for 24 hours. If I remember to go back and buy it 24 hours later I must have really wanted it. About 99% of the time I do not still want it or I forget about it. About a week later I find it in the cart and wonder what I could have possibly wanted any given item for. I am then glad I didn’t purchase it. This technique has saved me time and money. I try to only purchase things I need and if I can get it locally instead of online, I try to do that instead. This has really gotten rid of my habitual online shopping. 

Changing My Clothes Frequently

I don’t know why, and I don’t know how, but I have managed to create a daily habit of changing my clothes frequently in one single day. I have been known to make appearances in up to 4 completely different looks on the same day. I have done this as long as I can remember. I get bored with what I am wearing, I get sweaty and feel the need to change, and I just like to make outfits. I like to put together new outfits and I tend to do this when I am bored. I will put on jeans in the morning and wish I was wearing sweatpants 3 hours later. This leads to my time being wasted changing my clothes for no reason and leads to triple the amount of laundry. I tackled this by making it part of my routine to lay out my outfit the night before. I have made it a habit to check the weather, look at my schedule, and decide what outfit is functional. I try to pick one outfit and stick to it for the day. I have, in turn, decreased my laundry and number of outfit changes per day.

Meeting My Own Expectations

I am someone who likes to plan my entire day. I like to be early to everything, and I like to get everything done I have planned. When I do not accomplish my plan, I tend to be very critical of myself. This has often led me to end my day being very negative on myself and feeling really down. A little while ago I learned a tip from my friend to help with feeling accomplished. Instead of making a list of things to accomplish at the beginning of the day, make a list of things that you did complete at the end of the day. This means instead of looking at a page with only half of your tasks done, you end up looking at a page entirely of things you did. The focus is immediately shifted from looking at the undone tasks to the completed ones. I now end my day feeling better. I still like to plan my day, but I have shifted it towards being time oriented rather than task oriented. Instead of going to the library and saying I want to accomplish a certain amount of things, I plan to be there for a certain amount of time. Whatever I get done in that amount of time is what it is. This makes my time feel well spent and takes away some of my anxiety around not getting things done. It also ensures I am not spending too much time on any one particular thing and makes sure I get breaks in between. 

Breakfast

Breaking news! The whole world has been telling me that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. I have heard it my whole life, and yet never listened. As I discussed in one of my previous articles, breakfast has never been my forté. I find myself too busy or tired to walk to the dining hall in the morning before class. I love breakfast food, just not breakfast. Hence my Instagram bio, which says “you had me at breakfast served all day.” So I adopted some new dorm-friendly breakfast meals. I am trying to break the habit that I have had since middle school of just skipping breakfast as a meal entirely. This has made my morning a little easier because I get my meal in the easiest way possible. I have found that keeping the meals on hand in my room makes me all the more inclined to have breakfast and start my day correctly. The benefits of eating breakfast are long and hard proved so I won’t bore you with any of those details. However, I will mention that this habit was the easiest to break and has made my day more productive. 

I have always felt that new year’s resolutions were not worthwhile and easy to break. This year I figured if I was going to break something, it might as well be a bad habit. By working towards breaking these habits I have found myself to be more productive, energized, and accomplished. I ended up having more time in my day for relaxation. I hope this can inspire someone to break their own bad habits!

 

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