 While good habits can help you become your best self, bad habits can hold you back from excellence. By the end of this video, you'll be able to understand how bad habits form and identify them early to prevent them from becoming a more serious problem. You'll also learn tips from experts on how to break problematic habits according to science. Let's jump into it. The Habit Loop The first step to recognizing a problematic habit is asking yourself, how did I form this habit in the first place? According to psychology today, habits are formed by three elements. Triggers, behaviors, and rewards. Triggers are the things that prompt you to engage in your habit. Behaviors are the habit itself, and rewards are how the habit makes you feel better. This process is called the habit loop. Let's say you have a bad habit of shopping online a little too often, sometimes to the point of buying more than what you can afford. After some reflection, you may come to realize that you only go on spending sprees when you're bored and alone. This is because when you buy new things, you feel excited and get a temporary sense of fulfillment that relieves your loneliness. In this case, feeling lonely and bored is the trigger. Online shopping is the behavior, and the emotional relief and excitement is the reward. If you're stuck in a negative loop of triggers, behaviors, and rewards, this may be a sign that your bad habit is becoming a problem. The good news is, once you identify each element in your habit loop, you can break out of it and stop your bad habits. According to Healthline, one way to do this is to write down the cues or triggers that make you want to engage in the habit. What triggers your bad habits? Once you know what your cues are, you can take steps to change things in your environment and make the habits less tempting. For example, imagine that you have a habit of staying up too late. In this case, you can pay attention to the triggers that keep you up. You notice that you tend to call your friends before bed and talk to them for longer than you should. To eliminate this trigger, you can turn your phone off an hour before bedtime and tell your friends that you'd like to call them at an earlier time. Planning another time to call and eliminating the trigger of your phone takes away the temptation to stay up late talking to them. Intention. Neuropsychologist Dr. Jeff Gaines points out that negative habits are usually developed unconsciously and in response to stress. On the other hand, positive habits are often formed consciously and through continued effort. Think about the habits you're intentional about in your own life. If you have the habit of exercising, for example, you probably started doing it intentionally because you knew it was good for your health. Through repetition, you made it a part of your routine and it's now a beneficial habit. But if you have a bad habit like procrastinating, it's probably something you started doing unintentionally. Do you have a behavior that's unintentional that you tend to do more when you're stressed? If so, you could benefit from monitoring this behavior to avoid it becoming a problem. According to Psych Central, another way to break problematic habits is to recognize the reward it gives you. An important concept in behavioral psychology is when actions are rewarded, they are reinforced, causing us to do it more. But when they are punished, we're less likely to continue the behavior. How does your bad habit reward you? Once you know what your reward is, you can find healthier ways to get it. Nature versus nurture. Are your habits similar to your parents? In an interview with Bustle psychiatrist Dr. Brian Bruno said that bad habits are often learned from our parents. When we see our caregivers deal with things growing up, we learn these behaviors ourselves. As a result, we imitate bad habits that temporarily relieve stress or pain, but are not effective in the long run. Dr. Bruno also points out that bad habits can actually be passed down genetically. Overall, your habits are a result of both nature and nurture. If you have a habit that one or both of your parents have that affects them negatively, then this could be a sign that you're following in their footsteps and that it may become a problem. Now that you've realized it early, what can you do to prevent this from worsening? Dr. Tristan Michael Williams from the Berkeley Wellbeing Institute recommends replacing your bad habit with a more positive one. Stopping a bad habit without replacing it with something else isn't effective and is likely to result in a relapse. But stopping the habit and then replacing it with something better can help you break it for good. For instance, when you feel the urge to engage in your bad habit, leave your environment and go for a walk to de-stress and recharge. Continue to do this and replace your habit, and over time, you'll replace your old behavior with a healthier one. If you reached the end of this video and realized you have a few problematic habits, or maybe a lot, that's okay. A lot of us do. The first step to changing our habits is recognizing them. Have you ever broken a bad habit in the past? Share in the comments below. If you're interested in learning more tips on how to improve your mental health, subscribe and hit the like button. Thanks for watching, Sight2Goers. Until next time, box.