5 Toxic Habits You Don’t Know You Have & How To Change Them

Toxic habits are negative habits that have become a practice. These habits are often wolves in sheep clothing and it becomes difficult to pinpoint when it first started and how to intervene.

Their impact on our lives impede our ability to become healthy, to attain true happiness, and gain the successes we deserve. You deserve the chance to kick those toxic habits to the curb and create the life you’ve been yearning to live!

While the past functions as a reference for the future. It also could be the very thing that’s holding you back. Do past experiences determine your behavior, reactions and the decisions you undertake?

Use the past to your advantage. Learn from it. Don’t allow it to be the determining factor when decisions need to be made. If someone you trusted has hurt you in the past, don’t allow that experience to mold all your future relationships.

While treading with care is recommended, don’t allow the threat of impending relationship doom to become you.

Comparison is a definite thief! It steals your confidence, your self assurance and leaves you with other focused dependencies and self deprecating tendencies. The worst thing you can do is to look at someone else’s life and put them on a pedestal.

We put them on a pedestal of our own creation. We concoct a narrative in our minds of the perfection of their lives because all we see are the good things that encompass what we view to be the entirety. 

Little do we realize that we’ve put them on a human pedestal. Like us, they too have bad days, struggles and disappointments. We see their lives, but we don’t see into their lives.

Start a gratitude journal. Write down 3-5 things that you’re thankful for everyday. Never compare yourself to anyone else.

Be confident that you’re you and understand that you have something unique to create and build here.

Get out of bed, pull your shoulders back, hold your head high and go about your day with exuberance! You’ve got to motivate yourself to be the best you!

One of the most counterproductive mindsets is one that is an inactive positive mindset. So in other words, we feed possibilities and potentials to our mind and even convince ourselves of the good to come, but it never does.

Why? Because we haven’t taken the steps to move on from the hoping and wishing so that’s all it becomes; the never ending cycle of lack of results.

Hoping and wishing are bare minimum. Pair your positive mindset with productive actions. This creates momentum. Momentum eventually compounds to create tangible results and this is where you start to truly become inspired.

Create a plan or blueprint for your hopes and goals. Transform those wishes into real attainable, actionable steps. Remove those hopes and wishes from the mind and step into the action (s) of what you’ll accomplish.

How often do you find yourself on your phone or device mindlessly scrolling? Most people are on their devices before they kiss their spouse and kids good morning. In fact, they’re already playing catchup on the last 8 hours of missed memes, selfies and funny stories galore.

Studies show that the average American checks their phone about 96 times a day! That staggering number sends the message that we’re spending more time getting bits and pieces of other people’s lives rather than living ours to the fullest.

There are apps that monitor our time spent on our phone and others that may assist in fostering good habits.

An idea to break this toxic habit would be to turn off your notifications or simply put the phone away from your work area. My notifications for social media and WhatsApp are completely turned off. I check my phone when my tasks are completed or I have a break.

Establish rules for where your phone goes. For example, it doesn’t go to bed with you especially if it’s ruining your sleep cycle.

Draw a line down the middle of a sheet of paper to create two columns. The first being the helpful things your device assists you in accomplishing and the second being all of the time wasting things that happen on the device.

Start stacking the good things you do on your device to replace the unproductive things you do. For example, writing your list of things to complete leads to ➡️checking your email for 20 minutes, which leads to➡️ working on your website or content calendar.

Sometimes unkind speech pattern can take the form of snappy, carefully crafted, witty comments that renders a laugh here or there and crushes the spirit of the person on the receiving end.

If you’re one such person, watch the trajectory of your thoughts carefully. They can take you on a journey that reveals why we spew what we spew.

Practice replacing insults with compliments. Try harder. When we make an effort even if it’s for someone who doesn’t necessarily deserve our affection, the universe responds.

Our aura evolves, we become better not bitter and we begin to see the good rather than being quick to see what is wrong.

Possessing a kind speech pattern doesn’t mean you’re a push over nor does it mean you can’t stand up for yourself. It reveals who you are as a person and it welcomes everyone who matters to you in a nonjudgemental, loving way. And who doesn’t like to be around that kind of person?