The Difference Between Bad Habits And Good Habits

According to Dictionary.com, habits are an “acquired behavior pattern regularly followed until it has become almost involuntary.”  As a result, habits are actions that you repeatedly do until you almost consciously don’t know that you are doing them.  This quality can apply to both positive and negative actions; as a result, this means that you can form both good and bad habits.  The only real difference between good and bad habits is that good habits involve good behaviors or actions you want to repeat, while bad habits involve bad behaviors or actions you want to avoid doing.

For good habits to take hold, you need to continue to do the positive action or behavior you want to do repeatedly.  For instance, if you want to exercise early in the morning before you really start your day, then you need to take the necessary actions that will enable you to do this.  For example, you need to head to bed earlier to ensure you have time in the morning to work out.  You also need to ensure you can fall asleep right away; this means that you can’t be getting anxious over work or your family, and you certainly can’t be doing any strenuous activities right before you head to bed.  Taking such steps repeatedly will allow you to form the good habit of getting up early and working out before you start your day’s activities.

Bad habits are habits that you really want to break and not allow to take hold.  In order to do that, you need to ensure that the actions that lead to those bad habits don’t happen.  Referring to the earlier example, the equivalent bad habit would be not working out in the morning, since that is really the only time you can make in your day to work out (and, therefore, won’t work out otherwise).  If you continue to go to bed late and/or you do activities right before bed that cause you to toss and turn and not get a good night’s sleep, chances are high that you will not want to wake up early and will not want to work out in the morning.  Therefore, the actions of going to bed late and/or doing strenuous activities right before bed will lead to the bad habit of not working out in the morning.

Therefore, good and bad habits can be formed by taking the steps needed to repeatedly conduct the good or bad behavior over time.  We want to repeat the good habits, while stopping the bad ones; the key is recognizing what actions are needed to form the habits, then either repeating or stopping those actions to form the good or bad habit, respectively.