Sometimes all it takes to spoil our mood is to ruminate about the ugly decisions of our life. There are many times in life when we feel as though nothing matters at all. We wish we could be more zealous and our lives would be more happening. We often bemoan our bad circumstances and compare our boring lives to the dazzling lifestyles of our peers.
Have you ever wondered where the ultimate happiness you deserve is hiding? Look deeper. Maybe you are vandalizing your happiness with your toxic habits.
Happiness is something that must be developed; it does not arrive wrapped in a box. You must act to break free from self-destructive behaviours and allow some fresh air into your life to achieve this.
Understanding Toxic Habits
Toxic habits are those behaviours or fixed patterns of response to a varied range of stimuli present in both our internal and external environments, which are self-sabotaging in nature. Like any other habits, these often get so ingrained in our personality that they turn rigid and unchangeable. One struggles to break free from these destructive behaviours and keeps going around in them.
Easily understandable that these behaviours will interfere with your productivity, leading you to feel incapacitated from reaching your optimal potential. These habits will seriously lower your mood and make life more challenging.
These habits are the result of being in our comfort zones and feed upon ignorance. This is the reason it is more challenging to recognize and break these toxic habits.
Once we start becoming self-initiative about the truth that is keeping us away from success, it will be easier for us to start making amends.
Here Are These 7 Toxic Habits Could Be Your Secret Enemy
1. Procrastinating.
You may be unintentionally postponing your job and losing attention if you never find yourself starting any urgent tasks quickly enough. Piers Steel claims that 95% of people put things off to some extent. Knowing that there are people who share your experiences might be comforting, but it can be depressing to realize how much it can limit you.
Procrastination is the act of focusing our conscious attention and concentration on enjoyable, favorable, and intriguing but relatively trivial duties to avoid, put off, or give up crucial and urgent tasks that require your undivided attention and perseverance.
Procrastination might eventually sap your motivation, and cause you to lose focus and opportunities to demonstrate your abilities. These can then result in decreased life satisfaction, hopelessness, job loss, and severe stress.
Read More: 6 Habits that are damaging for your brain
2. Turning up late.
Every one of us has been late on rare occasions due to several factors.
However, if you consistently find yourself running far behind schedule in most situations, this will eventually become a bad habit.
Being late frequently conveys your attitude toward the assignment or work at hand. It shows how careless, haphazard, and unprofessional you are when interacting with other individuals and their time.
By being late all the time, you only send an extremely negative vibe about yourself which shows that self-centred enough to only consider your time to be important and devalue other people’s time.
3. Being jealous of other people.
The only monster we should be scared of is the green-eyed monster in our heads. Being envious of the success of others says so much about you.
Jealousy stems from low self-esteem and a lack of feelings of satisfaction with oneself. You are locked in a harmful habit if your envy is preventing you from moving forward in life and finding satisfaction in anything at all.
Jealousy makes you lose the chance to improve yourself and only focus on the goodness in others and lament one’s condition.
4. Negative self-talk.
Say this to yourself again: Your life will only be badly impacted by negative words and thoughts.
Numerous stress-inducing hormones and neurotransmitters would be released in the brain of an individual who saw the word “no” on a screen for less than a second, according to Psychology Today. If a brief exposure to unfavourable stimuli can have such an effect on you, just think of the long-term effects on your mind and body that negative self-talk can have.
Self-talk that is negative leads to unneeded tension, pessimism, and life unhappiness.
There are negative ideas like “I’m not capable of doing it” and “I can’t do it.” I’ll never pull it off,” will only hold you back. Positive affirmations should take the place of pessimistic ideas like “can’t” and “never”. Make use of phrases like “I can,” “I am enough,” and “I am capable.” These will boost your self-esteem and help you grow.
5. Monopolizing conversations.
Do you think you know nothing about the other person at the end of a conversation?
It’s common to talk nonstop about oneself when interacting with someone. Everyone loves to talk about themselves, including you and me. However, a conversation is the sharing and articulation of thoughts and ideas between two individuals. It entails speaking and listening as substitute acts.
Each new experience that arises from a conversation helps you to learn more. You may lose out on important information from someone if you are babbling and don’t give them any space to speak.
6. Reaching quick conclusions.
Quick conclusions are easy to draw but are often drawn based on insufficient information and shaky logical grounds.
Drawing hasty conclusions in discussions and arguments leaves behind little chance of understanding to prevail. In any kind of close interpersonal contact, it is extremely easy to jump to judgments about someone’s motives, character, and mode of expression.
Logically analyze and observe every situation through the open and non-judgemental lens and then reach conclusions to avoid biased and incorrect conclusions.
Read More: 6 Habits that make you look less intelligent
7. Comparing one’s life with others’ lives.
Everybody grows at a different rate. Comparison prevents us from breathing at our rate and puts us in a toxic competitive mindset.
Think about this: You have a unique life, and as such, your goals, aspirations, and milestones are all very different from those of other individuals. Is there anything you can compare your life to that of another person?
Rather than evaluating your life against that of others, concentrate on your goals and begin the process of bettering yourself. You will no longer have to be concerned with how prosperous, successful, or happy other people are to begin living the life of your dreams.