hey guys in this video we're going to be talking a little bit about bad habits
and then what you can do to get rid of these bad habits and in this section
after this we're going to discuss the best way to get rid of a bad habit so
what are some bad habits we all know some people who smoke now smoking is a
bad habit because of the effects it has on your health and even the effects it
has on your relationships you know when you're around friends there might be
some friends who don't smoke and will be offended if you try to smoke around them
another bad habit is drinking excessively now in the past video I said
drinking and having a drink now and then is okay but drinking excessively can
lead to more bad health and destroying your relationships even your financial
success because drinking costs money so does smoking these just wipe out the
four pillars of health wealth love and happiness it's like a wrecking ball just
boom boom boom boom boom another bad habit is eating out fatty or greasy
foods commonly when most people think of bad habits they think about stuff that
they do to their body but there are other bad habits like saying um and mmm
or even holding a grudge could be a bad habit hanging around certain people can
be bad habits if it's negative to the rest of your life and I'm sure you can
write down some bad habits in your life and that's what I want you to do right
now I want you to write down maybe 5 to 10 bad habits that you know that you can
identify in your life that you intentionally want to get rid of and
that's important you have to intentionally mindfully want to get rid
of them so let's talk a little bit about positive reinforcement so positive
reinforcement goes back hundreds of years
basically it's our brains way of saying hey I'm hungry what can we do to solve
this problem and it's Eve's food and then you eat food and you feel good and
you get that dopamine rush and then what happens is your brain is like this is
awesome let's do it more often and it rewards that process it says next time
we're hungry how about we eat some food and it goes on and on and on and this
gets compounded over many years of your life and eventually a very strong habit
is formed basically this positive reinforcement can create a habit now a
lot of times these create bad habits like with smoking someone might start
smoking in high school even middle school in college and what happens is
they feel bad they're hanging around their friends they're pushed into peer
pressure and they start smoking and it really sucks at first I mean if you've
ever taken and smoked a cigarette some people will just coffee and wheeze and
it's bad for your body and what happens is after a while they start to get a
dope ruch one because there's nicotine in it
and two because they're around other their friends and their friends are
starting to approve of them and what happens is this dopamine rush starts to
form a positive reinforcement and it turns into a habit which is very
difficult to quit many years later it works the same with food someone might
feel bad so they see ice cream they eat ice cream and the next thing you know
it's a habit whenever they're feeling down they go to ice cream as their vice
or smoking as their vice and maybe even drinking you should have paused the
video and written down five to ten habits that you want to get rid of now
what I want you to do is draw a line a little inch line and then I want you to
come up with triggers all right so you smoke what causes you to smoke you eat
ice cream what causes you to eat ice cream you might smoke because you're
stressed you might smoke just because that's what you do at the time of day
just because you're with friends and this is where it gets really important
because it's hard to get rid of a bad habit if you cannot find the trigger in
every habit has a trigger and the trigger was started back when the
positive reinforcement began trigger could be that you are hungry the trigger
could be that you hang around a group of friends the trigger could even be that
you get home from work and you see that alcohol sitting in your fridge and now
when we take positive reinforcement we can use positive reinforcement to get
rid of a bad habit by destroying the trigger so if you get rid of that
alcohol when you get home out of your fridge eventually you'll be less likely
to drink alcohol if you get rid of hanging around those friends that you
always smoke around or maybe even at that certain time of day do something
else go for a walk and this is one of the secret ways that you can get rid of
a habit and we'll talk about it in the next section but find those triggers in
your life and try to get rid of them something else that I found there was a
study and what they did was there were people who smoked and they wanted to try
to find and analyze what they could do to make them not smoke so one thing they
did is mindfulness and if you don't know what mindfulness is it's pretty awesome
there's a ton of YouTube videos on it it's basically living in the moment
thinking about what you're doing you know a lot of people when they smoke
they're actually mindless they're not even thinking about smoking it's just a
habit that they do because habits are when your brain stops spending resources
on tasks so it becomes a lower part of your thought process like thinking about
turning on your blinker you don't need to think about it your brain just goes
well I don't need to spend extra sugar calories on this we'll just put it in
the habit process and then I can just push a button just like a computer in it
happen you don't even think about it now when someone goes a smoke and it is
mindless this is something that you need to think about and you have to identify
the triggers to get rid of that so let's say your trigger is going out to lunch
with some friends so that trigger you know all of your friends are smoking and
they're eating lunch and it's midday you need to find that trigger and just get
rid of it basically destroy the rest of the positive reinforcement it'll just
crumble it like you see food you eat food and then you feel good well what
this can do is you're hanging out with friends you smoke and then you feel
better if you get rid of the hanging around with friends part that just
completely demolishes the rest of it the habit the trigger the behavior and the
reward and you can just Amala shat and that's one thing you can do about
positive reinforcement to get rid of a habit now another thing is back to that
study they said mindfulness helped a little bit in getting rid of smoking
when people started thinking about what smoking was doing to their body what
helped like almost 3 to 6 times as effective was when they were mindful and
curious when they were curious about what the smoking was doing to the body
when they wanted to know really you know like what is this doing to my lungs what
is this doing to my family what is this doing to make me a better person and
that's why self-improvement is really important because you have to have that
metacognition to think about how you're thinking and how you can make yourself
better if you want to overcome a bad habit and anyways there was a higher
success of them not smoking in the future if they were mindful about what
they were doing and every breath they took in of the cigarette they were
thinking you know this is filling my lungs with all kinds of negative toxins
and I'm literally taking years off my life statistically so we got positive
reinforcement we've got mindfulness with curiosity those are two ways that can
help another one is negative reinforcement so negative reinforcement
is a lot like positive reinforcement only instead of reward you get a tax or
something that's negative for example when you start smoking
light to cigarette then burn it on your hand and then continue to smoke and I
can guarantee you after like 10 or 15 times of doing this if you do it every
time your brain will start to rewire itself just a little bit and you'll be
like oh man I got to go back outside and burn myself again now I'm not suggesting
you to do this all the time I'm saying to use this as a concept you need some
negative reinforcement something to go Oh instead of maybe just going outside
and smoking maybe I'll go outside and smoke with a person who I do
not like and before you even started thinking about smoking you'll start
thinking about oh man when lunch comes I got to go out and talk to that person oh
man they're going to they're going to call me out on something I did wrong and
I've been talking about smoking a lot in this section and what I want you to do
is if if it's something other than smoking if it's drinking excessively or
if it's eating food or if it's hanging around with people who had no value to
your life or even just something out there that it's a habit that you want to
get rid of something you wrote down on that list I want you to convert it and
reverse-engineer it into this smoking example that I've been using so positive
reinforcement you need to get rid of the triggers mindfulness and curiosity you
need to understand what that habit is doing to yourself
your health your wealth your love and your happiness and those pillars of your
life in the negative reinforcement you need to think of what can I do as a
negative trigger that whenever I do this it will prevent me it will make me think
twice about doing it there's actually something if you do negative
reinforcement long enough or in the wrong way it's actually called learned
helplessness and learned helplessness is when someone does something long enough
and they say I've done it I've tried it for 10 years and I can't I can't stop
smoking that's called learned helplessness and it's actually a very
strong psychological condition in which you feel like whatever you do nothing's
going to happen and there's a ton of people out there in the world who have
this condition and I call it a condition because it really is a mental condition
that really needs to be solved because stuff you do can change the outcome now
there are certain situations where whatever you do you're not going to have
a big impact but you need to understand there are ways to stop smoking there are
ways to change my habits of drinking every night there are ways of committing
and not eating greasy food for a week and that's where negative reinforcement
comes in because if you do it wrong you'll actually teach yourself at no
matter what you do it's not going to change your situation and that's not
what I want you guys to go down I want you guys to understand that these three
methods that I just brought up the positive reinforcement you know
understanding positive reinforcement you can use it to get rid of the trigger
that was the first one the second one is mindful and curiosity so you need to
understand what is this you know every day I wake up and I text my girlfriend
good morning what is that good morning doing to our relationship you have to
understand your habits and reverse-engineer them and saying is this
profiting me or is this putting me in the hole and money am I
losing money am i lowering the value of our friendship am I losing years of my
life and that's what I want you to do with all of those habits on that list so
that was number two mindfulness and curiosity and the number three is
negative reinforcement and negative reinforcement doesn't work that well but
it does work if used correctly and what you do is you find a way to make your
habit less exciting something that you don't really want to do and that has to
come from within it's hard to make other people accountable for you you have to
make yourself accountable for yourself so as a review negatively reinforce
something that you are doing some people do this with like rubber bands every
time they do something you can train yourself like a Pavlov's dogs you can
pull the rubber band and snap it and eventually your brain will rewire itself
to go I don't want to do that because I don't want a rubber band snap number two
is to avoid the triggers number three is to be mindful and curious and basically
understanding what the habit is doing to yourself and number four this is the
most successful way to get rid of a bad habit and I'm going to talk about it in
the next section and it is to replace a bad habit with a good habit or at least
something better I hope you guys enjoy this short little clip and let's get on
to the next one if you guys enjoyed that video and want
to read the book I wrote that it came from search Amazon for habit harvester
or click link in the description the book is short enough to read in one
sitting but is jam-packed with tons of information just like you saw in this
video in fact I've also added a few extra
stories and fixed some of the errors found in this video course there's also
plenty of amazing illustrations to aid in the learning process and keep the
book fun to read if you're interested you can buy the Kindle version for $2.99
or sign up for a month of Kindle unlimited to get it for free which is
what I personally use and you get access to millions of other ebooks and
thousands of audiobooks included in your Kindle unlimited membership when you buy
the Kindle version you don't even need a Kindle to read it you can download the
Kindle app on your smart phone download the software for PC or even read it on
amazon.com through their cloud server if you want to watch the rest of the videos
in this series click this thingy or check the link in the description for a
playlist thank you guys so much for watching