•Bad Financial Habits
When bill paying time comes, do you find that you’re always robbing Peter to pay Paul, juggling finances just to get along and perhaps ending up with lots of late fees? If you answer yes to that question, chances are you’re plagued with bad financial habits.
Bad financial habits include overspending, getting yourself into too much debt so that you can’t pay your bills on time – or can’t pay them at all. What if you lost your job or source of income tomorrow – would you have enough money saved to tide you over until things turn around? You may have the knowledge about what you should be doing, but certain habits are keeping you from realizing your dreams.
Again, knowledge of exactly what you’re doing to cause financial problems is key to you breaking the habit. Begin to track your spending and cut out those things that are non-essential.
Leave the credit cards at home and begin to pay them off by paying more than you’re required – especially on those credit cards that charge the most interest. And, be sure to pay them on time to avoid late fees.
•Anger
An uncontrolled anger habit can denote depression and intense emotional pain. It can ruin relationships, keep you from advancing in your job or career and can cause long lasting depression – even though anger sometimes makes you feel good as you’re ‘getting it out of your system.’
But anger is a negative emotion that sometimes has a domino effect such as yelling at your family after your boss yelled at you that day. If anger is causing problems in your life, there are several ways to combat it.
First, take a deep breath before expressing anger at any time. Don’t speak during the anger moments. Instead, vow that you’re going to think about it first. Remember the old Chinese proverb: “If you are patient in one moment of anger you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.”
•Jealousy
If you’re seeking a path to self-awareness and you’ve developed a bad habit of jealousy, you’ll never find complete happiness or become aware of all that you could accomplish if jealousy wasn’t a part of your life.
Jealousy is usually an emotional reaction that comes from your own insecurities. Dealing with it means that you quit reacting to scenarios that cause the behavior. Controlling jealous thoughts and behavior is something like controlling a car racing downhill with no brakes.
To avoid the tragedy that’s about to happen, you should have avoided the hill in the first place. In order to avoid the hill, you have to change your core beliefs that make you react jealously to a situation.
When you find yourself engaged in a jealous reaction, shift your thoughts so that you can cast the feelings from your mind. If that means immediately doing something else, do it.
If part of your Self Development Plan includes getting rid of bad habits, know that controlling your thoughts is the quickest and best way to do it. It doesn’t matter if your habits run the gamut from smoking to laziness to being a workaholic – your every reaction to these habits can be controlled in a good way by first recognizing the origin of the habit and then find ways to turn your thoughts in another direction.
You might be able to eradicate bad habits for awhile, only to find that you relapse in a moment of weakness. Don’t give up. Figure out why you relapsed so that you can prevent it from happening again. Above all, don’t become discouraged and think of yourself as a failure. Don’t slip back into the patterns that formed the habit in the first place.
Eventually, changing your thoughts and your bad habit patterns will become easier and more natural for you to do. Aristotle said that ‘excellence is not an act, but a habit.’ It takes just as much effort to develop the habit of excellence as it does to keep repeating the old bad habits.
All bad habits have triggers that come before you actually engage in the habit. For example, for some people a shower might indicate that it’s time to wake up, dress and go to work while for others a nice warm shower might signal that it’s time to go to bed. One trigger makes you wide-awake and the other makes you sleepy and lethargic.
Whatever good and beneficial habits you’ve formed are worth reinforcing. The ones you consider bad and that you want to change must be carefully analyzed and then replaced by positive ones.
Many therapists say that the best way to replace a bad habit with a good one is to pledge to abandon the bad habit for only 30 days. Be sure that your plan includes how you’re going to replace the habit with new, positive thoughts and actions – then, for 30 days do your best to be consistent. By the end of the 30 days your new habit should be stronger than the old – bad – one.
Work on one bad habit at a time. If you try to do too much, you’ll simply become overwhelmed and discouraged. Begin the process of eliminating bad habits by starting with a ‘small’ one – one that you consider do-able. Each time you eradicate a bad habit from your life, you’ll feel more in control of your destiny and will be able to more easily master the next bad habit.
Another good way to ensure the success of eliminating bad habits is to tell others about your plan of action. The more help you can get for ‘your side,’ the more support you’ll be able to count on to see you through it.
Try to maintain a good attitude while you’re going through the process of kicking bad habits. That will get you past a great deal of the frustration and obstacles that come your way.
Keep positive by surrounding yourself with positive friends, do things you like to do, meditate and be forgiving of yourself while going through this time of change in your life.
Learning How to Deal with Stress, Depression and Anxiety
Stress, depression, anxiety – we’ve heard so much about these mental and physical ailments – that they’re detrimental to our complete happiness, stop us from achieving all that we can – and, they can turn into killers.
Medical experts have deemed stress as one of the top causes of strokes and heart attacks. It makes sense. When our body experiences stress, it’s attempting to defend itself. That’s great if you’re running from a swarm of killer bees, but if your body is experiencing constant stress, the system can become overwhelmed and break down.
You can suffer mental and physical consequences from too much stress. Even good experiences can cause stress in your life – and stress can lead to depression and anxiety. Preparing for a future wedding day, even though it’s going to be a joyful occasion, can cause a truckload of stress and when the big day arrives, the stress may come tumbling down in the form of tears, anxiety and even anger.
The thing that sets apart those who can handle stress effectively and those who can’t is how each of us reacts to the stress that might come our way. For example, there could be two people working for the same company and in the same work environment.
The company is losing money and may have to lay off employees. One person frets and complains about all the ‘stress’ of having to come to work each day knowing that could be the last. How is she going to pay bills and buy food?
The other person, however, has prepared for a situation where she might be out of a job – perhaps from illness or layoffs. She’s put aside a nest egg that can get her through the next few months in case she’s laid off. Rather than thinking of how she’s going to get by, she’s thinking about going into business for herself – or networking to find another job, should she have to.
Each person has the same type of stress, but one is prepared while the other one isn’t. Handling stress by dealing with surprises before they happen is a good way to reduce the way stress affects your life.
Other stressful situations aren’t so easy to prepare