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Happiness Habits You’ll Be Happy to Keep
How to cultivate new feel-good habits
Habits are slippery suckers. You only realise that a behaviour has become a habit when you perform whatever it is, well, habitually.
Research has found that people perform 43% of daily behaviours out of habit. These behaviours become imprinted in your neural pathways and feel hard to break. Every time you perform the habit, you strengthen the neural pathway.
As a coach, I help clients break their nightly drinking and eating chocolate habits to feel well and happy. But they don’t notice or think about changing their most challenging habit, overthinking, which is the most problematic habit.
But I can’t stop thinking, you might say. No, of course, you can’t. But you can stop overthinking problems. How often do you think about things that make you anxious? How often do you think about the things you don’t like about yourself or feel you have to change?
I’ve never had a client complain about being too happy or ask me how to stop a happiness habit.
Choosing happy thoughts
Habitual thinking is familiar, and people like what’s familiar. This makes you repeat old, unwanted habits until you embrace new thoughts and new ways of doing things.