Before making any decision about ourselves, the first thing that we all should be aware of is Ourselves as a human and our strengths and weakness. We can only improve in the future if we completely understand ourselves today. Understanding ourselves means Self Awareness.
Practicing self-awareness is very important in various ways and has various impacts on our lives:
- It helps us to understand ourselves as a person and also our relationship with others
- Helping us to understand our feelings better and the cause of our unwell feeling
- Empowers ourselves to manage ourselves effectively
- It enables us to create and develop meaningful relationships.
- Improves our awareness of our friends and family.
Healing Properties of Self-awareness:
The one thing that self-awareness brings with itself as a by-product is its healing properties. When we are in a mind of chaos, we often do not give proper attention to our mental health which is equally important as our physical health. We eat daily we jog daily we train ourselves daily, but do we meditate daily? do we pray daily? often the answer to these questions is no. Hence, we should start focusing on our mental health as well. This will not only help us reduce our mental stress but also bring calmness to our thoughts and behaviors which will eventually help us build better relationships with the people we meet daily like our parents, our partners, our colleagues, and so on. This helps us be mentally ready for future challenges and think optimistically in all matters.
How to attain Self-Awareness:
We already have an idea about everything related to the positives of practicing self-awareness. Now we will discuss how to practice or how we can start self-awareness as a daily practice in our lives. The best way to adapt this as a daily practice is by a 21-day practice rule. It sounds interesting and actually, it is also very interesting. This is proven by Dr. Maxwell Maltz in 1960, a Cosmetic Surgeon. In a self-help book written by dr. Maltz named Psycho-Cybernetics, 'A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life' he gives the idea that it takes 21-days for any individual to form a habit or leave one. He says whatever we practice daily, our personality is a reflection of that, if we practice anger, we will seem to be angrier always, if we practice calmness, we will seem to be a calm individual.
Habit Formation:
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In this article, we will now only talk about how we can practice daily for 21-days to make a positive habit or to leave a habit that was never supposed to be adopted by us. First, we must decide what practice we want to adopt or quit. Generally, people start 21-day practice to quit a previous bad habit, which eventually leads to improving the personality and overall, the whole lifestyle of an individual. Here we will go stepwise in quitting a habit and what methods and tricks we should adopt to make that habit work.
Quitting a habit and adapting a habit both are very much interrelated. Suppose a person wants to adopt a new habit it will never be possible without quitting neighboring bad habits, for example, if you want to wake up early every day at 6 AM, this will be impossible to form a habit without quitting the late-night habits, we will have to sleep early to wake up early. Similarly, if we want to leave a bad habit for example smoking, we will have to adopt a healthy lifestyle, like green tea to overcome the craving for tobacco, and a morning walk to have fresh air which will ensure that we have started liking our decision of healthy living.
Quitting a Bad Habit in 21-days
To understand the methods and tricks of how to quit a habit and how is it going to impact you in your life, you must have a motive first which pushes you to walk an extra mile in this journey.
- Strong Motive: Without a strong motive it is nearly impossible to continue or even start of quitting a bad habit's journey. A motive helps you to push yourself every day and ultimately complete the time span of 21 days. Not only this but also when the 21 days duration is over still, we need something to continue the healthy journey, this motive will keep you moving.
- Supervision: It is very important to have the right and strong supervision throughout this journey, the right person can only guide you through when it's dark.
- Right Alternative: It is always difficult to quit an old habit completely. So it is better to start with an immediate healthy alternative to that habit, for example, If we want to stop munching at night then the best way would be to delay dinner by 1 to 2 hours and sleep on time.
- Keep monitoring: It is very important to keep clear monitoring of the path you are covering, if you feel there is any wrong you are doing keep a note and think of things you can do to correct it on an immediate basis and continue your work thereafter.
- Continue the good adoptions: Even if you are having a bad or you fail in doing good someday still you should not stop the process of changing and continue your good adoptions.
- Be Brave at odd times: Odd times make strong men, if you feel this time is breaking you then don't worry, just remember this is just stretching your boundaries to make you feel a little better about everything around you.
- Appreciate yourself: People always remember the process but forget about the prizes, keep helping yourself with little prizes every day. This will not only make you feel better but also create a sense of achievement which will eventually help you in all your neighboring tasks.
We can always forget our motive or other strategies but what we should never forget is our end result. And our end result can never be starting or changing some habits. The end result is always the beginning of a process, the process towards the path of self-improvement. Never restrict yourself to any number of days, yes 21 days could definitely be the number of days required to start a process but becoming a self-aware and Improved person it will always be a time-consuming process.
AUTHOR : SUMIT JHA
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