Bad habits you need to quit right away

Too much alcohol interferes with the brain’s communication pathways, making it harder to think clearly and move with coordination.

IN my latest book with Life Hack, 10 Rules of Super Productive People, I discuss the importance of creating your productivity ritual — a routine that helps you to maintain a peak level of energy, so as you get the best out of your days. Part of creating your productivity routine involves removing activities that drain you (what I call “kryptonites”), and that includes your bad habits.

Like it or not, bad habits are bad for you — mentally, physically, emotionally, and even socially in some cases. While some bad habits are harder to quit than others, it doesn’t change the fact that you need to get rid of them. Here are 13 bad habits to quit right away.

1. Stress eating

I used to be a serious stress eater. I would eat whenever I felt unhappy, stressed, disappointed, anxious, or even… happy! My eating had nothing to do with being hungry, and everything to do with using food to fill my emotional voids. While eating would comfort me, this feeling was momentary and would disappear right after I was done eating. Instead, what I had left would be the same emotional void that triggered me to eat in the first place (be it unhappiness or stress), a 2,000 excess calorie intake over what I should have eaten for the day, and anger at myself for having stress ate.

I’ve since overcome stress eating, and I have a healthy relationship with food today where I no longer use food as a tool to fill my emotions. If you are a stress eater, don’t fret — here’s my emotional eating series to stop stress eating once and for all.

2. Nail biting

Not only is nail biting unhygienic, it is also socially repelling, leads to dental problems like malocclusion of the anterior teeth, potentially cause stomach problems, and lead to severely deformed fingernails in the long run. People who bite their nails tend to have shorter nails than the average person; their nail plates also experience scarring and may eventually become absent.

Understand what triggers your nail biting behavior and replace it with another neutral to positive habit. For example, if you bite your nails when you are stressed, go for a walk or listen to music instead the next time you feel stressed. Read: How a Relapse Begins: The Key To Removing Bad Habits From Your Life

3. Hanging out with naysayers

We all know these people — people who play devil’s advocate to every idea you have and every goal you want to pursue. We are already our greatest self-critics, so it doesn’t help when there’s someone beside us, ever ready to pounce on what we say and tear it down. Hang out less with these naysayers, and spend more time with supportive people who share constructive feedback instead. You will be much happier this way.

Read: 8 Tips To Tackle Naysayers

4. Being with people who don’t appreciate you

Haven’t all of us been in this situation before? Trying to please people who don’t appreciate us? Bending over backwards to be there for people when they are never there for us? While we give without expectations of return, we need to draw a line with people who don’t value us, because these people damage our souls. Stop spending time with people who don’t appreciate you, and spend more time with people who do instead.

5. Smoking

Image source: CDC Vital Signs, Sep 2010 issue

Smoking is one of the leading causes of preventable death globally. In just the United States alone, about 500,000 deaths are attributed to smoking-related diseases annually. A recent study estimated that as much as one-third of China’s male population will have significantly shortened life-spans due to smoking! Gender-wise, male and female smokers lose an average of 13.2 and 14.5 years of life respectively — that’s over a decade of life right there. (Source: Health effects and regulation of smoking)

Not only that, smoking causes pre-mature skin aging (i.e. wrinkles), yellowing of teeth, bad breath, and worse of all — jeopardy of the health of people around you, including your loved ones. Studies have shown that non-smokers exposed to second-hand smoke are at risk to many of the health problems associated with direct smoking. (Source: Passive smoking)

6. Excessive drinking

Image by: QuinnDombrowski

All of us know that drinking too much alcohol is bad for us, but do you know how bad it really is? According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, drinking too much — be it on a single occasion or over time — can seriously damage your health:

• Brain:
  • Alcohol interferes with the brain’s communication pathways, making it harder to think clearly and move with coordination.
• Heart:
  • Cardiomyopathy – Stretching and drooping of heart muscle
  • Arrhythmias – Irregular heart beat
  • Stroke
  • High blood pressure
• Liver:
  • Steatosis, or fatty liver
  • Alcoholic hepatitis
  • Fibrosis
  • Cirrhosis
• Pancreas:
  • Pancreatitis, a dangerous inflammation and swelling of the blood vessels in the pancreas that prevents proper digestion.
• Cancer:
  • Mouth
  • Esophagus
  • Throat
  • Liver
  • Breast

You can read more about alcohol’s effects on our body here.

If you drink a lot, perhaps cutting it out right away will be tough. Cut down the number of glasses you drink each time, followed by the number of times you drink a week. If need be, seek help from an AA group — you aren’t alone in this. Change starts from today.

7. Eating junk food (including diet soda)

Junk food — they are everywhere in our society today. From McDonald’s, to KFC, to Burger King, to 24-hour takeouts, junk food such as fries, highly processed burgers, and sodas has become a staple in our society today.

If you think, “Hey, but junk food is tasty!”, think again: A study by Paul Johnson and Paul Kenny suggests that junk food consumption alters brain activity in a way similar to addictive drugs like cocaine and heroin. “After many weeks with unlimited access to junk food, the pleasure centers of rat brains became desensitized, requiring more food for pleasure.” And you wonder why you seem to crave fast food when you just had some the day before!

While it may not be possible to remove junk food completely from our diet right away, we can reduce our junk food consumption starting today. Instead of soda, opt for a fruit juice (fresh juice, not the carbonated kind) or mineral water. Instead of fries, switch to mashed potato, a salad, or rice (many food outlets allow for this today). Instead of a fried meat patty, go for a grilled one. Where possible, opt for healthy food joints like salad bars and delis as opposed to fast food outlets. Every little step goes a long way.

8. Eating too much red meat

There has been conclusive evidence that consumption of red meat increases the risk of colorectal cancer, and suggestive evidence that it increases the risk of oesophageal cancer, lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, and endometrial cancer. In addition, some studies have linked consumption of large quantities of red meat with breast cancer, stomach cancer, lymphoma, bladder cancer, lung cancer and prostate cancer! (Source: Potential health risks of red meat)

Personally I’m a vegetarian so I don’t consume red meat, but for those of you who consume red meat, do watch out and limit your intake — better still, cut it out of your diet. World Cancer Research Fund recommends limiting intake of red meat to less than 300g (11 oz) cooked weight per week, “very little, if any of which to be processed.”

9. Watching too much TV

I stopped watching TV since eight years ago and I have never regretted it. Every once in a while I will switch on the telly to see what is on, and then I will switch it off because it’s just the same boring shtick over and over again.

Watching TV, particularly well-written dramas, can be a good way to unwind. However, remember that TV isn’t your life. Spending three hours every night watching TV will not change your life for the better. Rather, using that time to reflect on your life, take stock, and take action on your goals will.

Read: 6 Steps To Remove TV From Your Life

10. Being late

Not only is being late being rude to others, it also means that you’re always rushing from one place to another, playing catch up in your agenda, and having to apologize to every person you meet.

Stop being late and practice… not being punctual, but being early instead. Target to arrive 15 minutes earlier before any appointment and bring along something to do in those 15 minutes (or longer if the other person turns out to be late). Now you can stop playing catch up and stay ahead in life.

11. Being in bad relationships

Are you always dating the wrong guys/girls? Do you end up with jerks all the time? Well, you may not be able to stop yourself from meeting jerks, but you can certainly stop yourself from furthering contact with them, spending time with them, or even… entering into a relationship with them.

I used to invest myself in this guy who was nothing but toxic for me. After a good five months of experiencing nothing but getting burned over and over again, I realized that he was a total waste of my time and I deserved better. I decided to cut him off, and it was soon after that I met my soulmate.

Read:

• 12 Signs It’s Time To Move On From a Relationship
• 8 Signs You Have Found “The One”

12. Leaving things to the last minute

Burning the midnight oil isn’t fun — it’s exhausting. Those of you who got through college by burning the midnight oil would have learned this the hard way. Not only is it damaging for your body, it is also mentally draining as you’re constantly in a hyper-tense mode, feeling anxious about whether you can finish your work on time.

Start today on a new note. Rather than react to your deadlines, be proactive about them by planning ahead, identifying what needs to be done for the week, and getting things done in advance. By staying ahead of your tasks, you can also use your extra time to plan ahead in your life and get more things done.

13. Focusing on the negatives

In every situation there are two ways you can react: zoom down to the problem areas and crib about how things aren’t the way you want, or celebrate the areas that are going well and work on making everything better. Many of us see the importance of doing the latter, but in practice we do the former. Why though? Criticizing and focusing on the negatives is easy, but it doesn’t empower nor inspire us to be better.

Make a change — for every negative encounter you run into, I challenge you to identify three things that are good about it. Practice doing this for one week, and by the end of the week you’ll find that your first instinct is to think positive, not negative.

Read: 10 Surefire Ways To Be Unhappy in Life

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