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The Compound Effect
Strategies for Eliminating Bad Habits
- Identify your triggers: Look at your list of bad habits. Figure out the “who,” the “what,” the “where,” and the “when” underlying each bad behavior.
- Clean the house. Get rid of whatever enables your bad habits.
- Look again at your list of bad habits. How can you alter them so that they’re not as harmful? Can you replace them with healthier habits or drop-kick them altogether?
- Ease in. For some of your old habits, it may be more effective to take small steps to ease into unwinding them.
- Or jump in. We are all different and some researchers have found that it can be paradoxically easier for people to make lifestyle changes if they change a great many bad habits at once.
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