Make no mistake about it, trying to break a habit is quite a tall order. Not everyone can do it. If habits are so easily broken, then most people will not smoke. If habits are easily dealt with, then most people will not cheat on their wives, watch pornography, steel, lie and do all sorts of anti-social behavior. But we live in the world we live in because habits really are very hard to break.
The good news is that as difficult as habits may seem, they are not impossible. There are a lot you can do to counteract them and adopt healthier habits. This is crucial if you are trying to lose weight. Weight lose is never easy. In fact, sustainable weight lose involves a lot of changes. We’re not just talking about changes in the physical level, we’re also talking about changes in the mental, emotional and spiritual level. To be honest, if you want to live a healthier lifestyle, if you want to lose that weight, and you want to keep it off, you have to get ready. You have to be prepared to go all the way. One key set of tools that you can use to achieve a healthier lifestyle is the psychological secret of rituals. Everybody has a ritual. Everybody does certain things a certain way. Everybody has their own distinctive style. There is a way to use certain rituals to help you lose weight.
As you probably already know, losing weight is fairly straight forward. You must eat less calories and burn more calories. You can actually do either of these things. Preferably, you should do both. But regardless, you should do at least one of them and produce a net negative calorie intake. When you achieve net negative calorie intake, your body will try to compensate for the lost calories by burning your stored calories. In other words, it would start burning fat. This is the state you’d like to get in. Unfortunately, your habits get in the way. A certain emotional trigger happens, or you perceive something and then you read certain emotions into it, and all of a sudden you find yourself chewing down on some greasy burgers or stuffing your face with some calorie dense chocolate cake. The good news is that rituals can help you offset this. Keep reading below to figure out how.
Rituals Are Never Emotionally Neutral
As mentioned above, rituals really boil down to how people do certain things and their timing every single day. Well, when you do your rituals like sitting down to have a bowl of cereal for breakfast, brushing your teeth, picking your clothes, they’re never emotionally neutral. There is some sort of emotional payoff. Of course, that emotional payoff set a much more subdued level than habits. But make no mistake about it, there are emotional signals being sent and being received.
We Have an Unlimited Capacity to Read Emotions into Things
The psychological secret of turning rituals into your secret weapon against your bad habits is to read the right emotions into them. You can choose to feel good after you engage in a certain ritual. If you keep that in up, then the associate becomes automatic. In fact, the more you do this, the higher the likelihood that you will successfully reprogram yourself into looking at a certain ritual a certain way.
We Are Always Judging
Our body is really just a data collection device. We see, we smell, we taste, we touch, we hear, but at the bottom of it all, these are just data points, in other words, they are neither good nor bad. They are just data. They are just information. When these facts reach our brain, on the other hand, that’s when things get real. Why? We judge this data. We incorporate it into our internal narrative or internal story, and we make sense of them by plugging them into this central narrative we already have. This central narrative, this mental picture is not emotionally neutral. We are always judging the data point as to whether they fit or they don’t. This is important to keep in mind because if you are going to try to transform your rituals into habits that would help you lose weight, you need to be aware of this process. If you want to use your rituals to offset your negative habits, you have to be aware of this judging process.
Be Aware Of How Rituals Are Based On Judgment
Since rituals are not emotionally neutral and emotions are a form of judgment, then it logically follows that rituals are based on judgment. This is not a bad thing. Just like with anything else in life, you can judge the wrong way, or you can judge the right way. It really all boils down to you. What is wrong or right? Well, one thing is certain. What is right benefits you. So in the case of weight lose, how you judge a certain ritual, and how you perceive a certain ritual, emotionally speaking, must benefit you or else, you need to tweak that ritual so it can lead to the right set of physical benefits.
Pick the Right Rituals That Lead To a Healthier Lifestyle
The great thing about rituals is that they’re not as automatic or as emotionally programmed as habits. As a result, we have a lot more power in picking and choosing them. It’s very important then to pick the right rituals that lead to a healthier lifestyle. Look at your set of rituals, which ones burn more calories? Which one allow you to resist eating too much? Which ones allow you to lose weight and keep it off? This should be your selection criteria for your rituals. While we may not be able to choose our habits once they have taken life of their own, we do have a lot more power over rituals that we engage in every single day. The key to successfully pulling this off is to pick the kind of rituals that have the emotional payoffs that you need to help you get the kind of weight lose results that you are looking for.
T.C.
I agree that habits are really hard to break. I’ve tried and failed at dieting more times than I’d like to admit and thanks to your article, I’m ready to try again. I never thought about my daily rituals and the emotions tied to them. I plan to change my habits to have a more positive outcome.