Understanding Triggers for Unhealthy Behavior and How to Manage Them
Unhealthy behavior disrupts your life and keeps you from achieving your objectives. It jeopardizes your emotional and physical well-being and squanders your time and effort. According to a study conducted by the Erasmus University Rotterdam, 8% of respondents engaged in unhealthy behaviors such as smoking, alcohol consumption and living a sedentary lifestyle.
Let's be honest. When we're trying to adopt healthy behaviors, it can feel as though the entire world is against us. While avoiding the endless temptation of making the "unhealthier" decision can feel like a war, triggers are the catalysts that cause us to react in certain ways to certain situations. Let’s understand what triggers unhealthy behavior and how to overcome them.
There are three key reasons for most unhealthy habits -
1. Peer Pressure
Even if you are wholeheartedly committed to living a healthy lifestyle, this determination can go out the window if you surround yourself with people who do not support your lifestyle choices. This struggle gets worse if they not only engage in unhealthy habits, but ridicule and judge you when you try to change yours. If you give in to societal pressures, it is not going to be easy to come out of this rabbit hole.
2. Stress & Anxiety
Studies show when you’re under stress or anxiety, you’re not in a rational state of mind and therefore gravitate toward anything that will make you feel better, turn off the fight or flight response and restore your stress hormone levels. Our inclination is to react on autopilot, which leads to impulsively grabbing for a glass of wine or a pack of cigarettes (or any other vice) if we start to feel stressed.
3. Emotional Cravings
When a habit has been with us for as long as we can remember, and is linked with comfort and familiarity, it is usually more difficult to break. For example, you may not eat Mac n Cheese everyday like you did as a kid, but your ties to this comfort food will make it harder to say no when you are presented with it. Afterall, we only have a finite amount of willpower, and if a particular unhealthy habit pulls on our heartstrings, we may keep coming back for more to satisfy an emotional craving.
All of your current behaviors, whether good or negative, are present in your life for a reason. You can convert the unhealthy behaviors that don't serve you well into healthy habits through three techniques -
1. Make a Plan to Replace Your Undesirable Habit
You must prepare ahead of time for how you will react when you are confronted with the stress or boredom that triggers your negative habit. What are your plans if you feel the urge to smoke? Instead, try breathing exercises. Whatever it is and whatever you're dealing with, you need to make a strategy to replace your bad behavior with something better.
2. Remove as Many Triggers as Possible
Don't go to the bar if you smoke while drinking. If you eat cookies while they're still in the house, toss them all out. If the first thing you do when you sit down on the couch is pick up the TV remote, put it in a different room's closet. Avoid the items that promote harmful habits to make it simpler for yourself to break them.
3. Self-Awareness is Key
It's easy to become engrossed in your negative feelings about your unhealthy behaviours. You may either make yourself feel guilty or spend your time fantasising about how things could be. However, these thoughts divert your attention away from the present situation.Instead, awareness is what will guide you to change your life for the better. Consider tracking the following to make you conscious of the problem and identify solutions to manage it better -
- When is your bad behaviour most likely to occur?
- How many times a day do you do it?
- Where have you gone?
- Who are you hanging out with?
- What causes the behaviour to start and what causes it to be triggered?
The idea isn't to blame yourself or feel bad for doing something unhealthy or unproductive in the beginning. The only purpose is to be aware of when and how frequently it occurs. Being aware of the problem will help you wrap your brain around it. Then you can start putting the suggestions in this article into practice to break your negative behaviour. It takes time and effort to break unhealthy habits, but most importantly, it needs patience. We hope these three tips will help you counter the triggers for behaviours you are trying to overcome.
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