December Daily: bad habits

princessofgeek prompts: Advice on changing bad habits -- what has worked for you in the past.

Oh, dear -- I'm really more of the Before picture here than the After picture; I'm full of bad habits! But I've been thinking about this all day, and I do have two observations, one really specific and one more general.

Specific: A lot of bad habits turn out to be rooted in the primate grooming instinct. Nailbiting, for instance, or scab-picking, or my most intractable bad habit of picking/biting my cuticles. These are spectacularly difficult to break because we seem to be wired for them.

In that case, I've found it best not even to try to use my pathetically inadequate store of willpower to force myself not to monkey with a ragged cuticle -- my solution is to make sure I don't have a ragged cuticle, by moisturizing the hell out of them and being very quick to trim off any tempting ends. This worked on the kidlet when they were small, too.

On a more general level, my piece of advice would be: Don't try to break a bad habit; try to establish a good one.

One of our childrearing books said that toddlers have a harder time comprehending and responding to a negatively-phrased command (Don't spill it!) than the same command phrased positively (Keep every drop in the cup!). And we really found that to be true -- for kidlet and for us as well.

So it works better to tell yourself, "Go to bed before eleven," than, "Don't stay up so late." It works better to say, "Eat a salad every day," than to say, "Eat less junk food." (Or, worse yet, the nebulous "Eat better," which either looms over you so that you never feel you've achieved it or just fades into the background with the other vague intentions we all carry around with us.)

Also: Sometimes the mere process of trying to re-word a negative into a positive shakes loose some thoughts you didn't know you had. When you try to flip "Watch less television," do you get "Turn the TV off as soon as Downton Abbey is over," or "Only watch an hour of TV a day," or "Be doing something else when the news starts," or "Read more books"?