Habits Can Help or Hurt Us

If we aren’t feeling our best, we can check in with ourselves to see what habits might be contributing to our uneasy feelings. We can investigate what habits cultivate anxiety, anger, judgement, fear, and stagnation. We can also contemplate our habits that cultivate joy, wonder, and appreciation. It’s easy to be misled by stray habits, including mental traps like negative thinking or worrying, but we can reorient to make sure we’re aligned with our goals by looking into our reality clearly and deeply. When we non-judgmentally observe our habits, we can note their ratio of positive to negative effects. In any moment, we can strengthen the seeds of our more enjoyable habits by visualizing ourselves successfully accomplishing our behavioral goals.

Looking Into Our Habitual Behaviors

Sometimes, it can be hard to see ourselves. We can have all kinds of behavioral habits without being fully aware how we’re acting. Our brain learns routines to save energy and more easily problem solve by naturally following old styles of thinking. We can reveal these unconscious habits by looking at our thinking patterns and our emotional style. 
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Our thinking patterns can be revealed by studying the type of thoughts we find ourselves lost in. Do we typically have thoughts that are positive, appreciative, supportive, and flexible? Or is our thinking pattern more negative, worried, suspicious, or insecure?

Our emotional style is reflected in how we respond to stimulus around us. How do we act when we’re excited, surprised, rewarded, or appreciative? How do we act when we’re stressed, sad, angry, or uncertain? Do we turn to others for support or are we more inclined to turn inward for strength when coping with stress? Do we eat comforting foods, chew our fingernails, or breathe mindfully when facing emotionally challenging situations? 

When we develop our self awareness, we can see what behaviors serve us and which don’t. We can reveal a great deal of positive behaviors in ourselves by investigating our passions. Passions are anything that makes us feel alive! We can have many passions, some that challenge us like rock climbing or learning a new skill, and some that relax us like watching a beautiful sunset or spending time with loved ones.

When we’re familiar with our passions and regularly engage with them, we‘ll develop confidence to release from any behaviors that lead us away from achieving our dreams and put up new behaviors to keep us close to enjoying what’s most important to us. We can cultivate healthy behaviors when we acknowledge what’s serving us, and we can politely separate from what’s not.

Choose Consciousness

At times, we may act without being fully conscious. We follow habits of the mind that compel us to think, act, and feel according to how our mind has been conditioned up until this point. When we live in a state of consciousness, we have the power to choose. To achieve this consciousness, we become present. We can be present with our everyday tasks, our achievements, our cravings, our stress, and all of our many feelings throughout the day. When we notice we’re experiencing a negative feeling, we can choose to focus on the present moment. We slow down, breathe to calm our nervous system, and inhale stillness and exhale clarity. Mindful breathing invigorates our whole body and settles our mind. We can touch peace and happiness in the present moment, supported by our breath. Stopping is meditation. Looking deeply is meditation. The moment we recognize we’re suffering, we can choose to attach to our feelings, or we can choose to attach to the present moment.

Good Choices Require Full Consciousness

No one chooses to suffer. The dysfunction, pain, and conflict within us happens because there’s not enough presence in us to hold our attention away from dwelling in the unease of the past and future. To free ourselves from our worries and ailments, we can fill our awareness with nonjudgmental acceptance of the present moment. Being in the present like this is a choice that requires genuine effort to maintain, but within that choice is peace, stillness, and freedom from suffering. It takes a high degree of consciousness to stay present, but we when we're able to disconnect from our inherited patterns and beliefs and act fully from the present moment, we can experience true choice in how we want to feel, think, and behave. Often our anger, our anxiety, and our frustrations form as conditioned responses that we've learned through our experiences and from other people; but we have an opportunity to break these patterns and consciously create new conditions. Choice is being in the moment, choice is being present. 

Deepen Your Understanding: Sometimes we can find ourselves stuck, unable to feel at ease. There are many factors that can block our wellbeing, including internal imbalances, habitual behavior, thinking styles, communication patterns, and toxic relationships. Learn more about common blocks to wellbeing here.

Common Blocks To Wellbeing

Identifying Our Intentions

All of our actions begin with an intention. We can think of intentions as small seeds we plant in our mind that blossom into thoughts, actions, and feelings. Often, we aren’t aware of our intentions and act upon them unconsciously. We can settle into autopilot with our actions and never question why’re we’re doing them in the first place. We can have both good and bad intentions, so being able to identify the thoughts behind our decisions can help us choose more skillful ways to respectfully indulge our impulses.

Do we want to view things with optimism, or are we expecting disappointment and frustration? ​Setting an intention to enrich our perspective with positivity, flexibility, concentration, mindfulness, loving-kindness, or any other valuable quality, will improve our quality of life. Tune into your intentions to learn more about yourself and make each action, experience, and reaction more thoughtful.

Positive + Healing Intentions

Deepen Your Understanding: We can collect an assortment of unhelpful habits as we try to cope with stress, difficult emotions, and challenging relationships. We release from impulsive and harmful behavior by becoming more aware of our actions.

Unhelpful Habits

Today I Choose

We choose our reality. We can’t always control our situation, but we can choose our reactions and we can choose how we train our perspective.

​The more we train our responses to be positive, loving, and calm, the more naturally we’ll react in a gentle and productive way under stress.

Loving Kindness

Stress Management

Transforming Difficult Emotions

“Today I Choose:

Calm over Chaos,
Serenity over Stress
Peace over Perfection 
Grace over Grit
Faith over Fear”

- Mary Davis