How do habits make the future positive?

Habits or what we do regularly determines how our lives will be and how happy we will be. Think about what we do and think about daily is who we are.

My experience of living abroad has really allowed me to understand how habits form and determine how my future self will behave. For example, I know that if I arrive in a new town and stay there for awhile, very quickly the things which I did randomly at the beginning will become habits.

Despite being in a totally new place I quickly find my favourite places to eat and relax and drink. Every day I will go to lunch to Cafe that I by chance visited on my first day in town. There are hundreds of possibilities to go and eat somewhere but people just like me form their habits and never think of changing them.

So why not examine these defining habits and make sure they are the best possible.

There are some positive habits that we really should develop for our happiness. There are obvious things such as having a hygiene routine in the morning, exercising and eating healthy. To more abstract self-improvement: taking up meditation or starting a diary of gratitude or positive experiences. Quite often these are the activities that we know we want to do but always never quite do because we let life distract us.

Equally important is looking at our unproductive and bad habits that are holding us back. It is clear that watching the television all the time, unhealthy lifestyle choices ect are not going to help us on our path of happiness. We need to recognise that these are just habits and can be broken over time by developing alternative positive habits to fill our time with.

When breaking a bad habit, I believe you should always find the positive source within the bad habit and expand on it to make a new habits. Some examples.

Bad habit: Smoking
Positive source: I like socialising with other smokers.
New habit: Talk and connect with 5 strangers a day to feel social.

Bad habit: Watching tv
Positive source: I like learning new things.
New habit: Learn a foreign language to learn about a whole new culture.

So I hope you found a couple of new and positive habits to enact in your life. Now you need to take action. Do this new activity for 30 days. This is because you need time to get used to this behaviour and see if it right for you.

Good luck with your habit explorations!