Travis Bradberry* says bad habits can creep up on you and be damaging your health and workplace relationships before you even know it.
You are the sum of your habits. When you allow bad habits to take over, they dramatically impede your path to success.
Bad habits are insidious, creeping up on you slowly until you don’t even notice the damage they’re causing.
Breaking bad habits requires lots of self-control. Research indicates that it’s worth the effort, as self-control has huge implications for success.
University of Pennsylvania psychologists, Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman measured students’ IQ scores and levels of self-control upon entering university.
Four years later, they looked at the students’ grade point averages (GPA) and found that self-control was twice as important as IQ in earning a high GPA.
The self-control required to develop good habits (and stop bad ones) also serves as the foundation for a strong work ethic and high productivity.
Self-control is like a muscle — to build it up you need to exercise it. Practice flexing your self-control muscle by breaking the following bad habits.
Using your phone, tablet, or computer in bed
Most people don’t realise this harms their sleep and productivity.
Short-wavelength blue light plays an important role in your mood, energy level, and sleep quality.
In the morning, sunlight contains high concentrations of this blue light.
It halts production of the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin and makes you feel more alert.
In the afternoon, the sun’s rays lose their blue light, which allows your body to produce melatonin and start making you sleepy.
By the evening, your brain doesn’t expect any blue light exposure and is very sensitive to it.
Most of our favourite evening devices — laptops, tablets, and mobile phones — emit short-wavelength blue light brightly and right in your face.
This exposure impairs melatonin production and interferes with your ability to fall asleep as well as with the quality of your sleep once you do nod off.
The best thing you can do is to avoid these devices after dinner (television is okay for most people as long as they sit far enough away from the set).
Impulsively surfing the Internet
It takes you 15 consecutive minutes of focus before you can fully engage in a task.
Once you do, you fall into a state of increased productivity called flow, which research shows you can be five times more productive than otherwise.
When you click out of your work because you get an itch to check the news, Facebook, a sporting score, or what have you, this pulls you out of flow.
This means you have to go through another 15 minutes of continuous focus to re-enter the flow state.
Checking your phone during a conversation
Nothing turns people off like a mid-conversation text message or even a quick glance at your phone.
You will find that conversations are more enjoyable and effective when you immerse yourself in them.
Using multiple notifications
Studies have shown that hopping on your phone and email every time they ping for your attention causes your productivity to plummet.
Instead of working at the whim of your notifications, pool all your emails/texts and check them at designated times. This is a proven, productive way to work.
Thinking about toxic people
There are always going to be toxic people who have a way of getting under your skin and staying there.
Each time you find yourself thinking about a co-worker or person who makes your blood boil, practice being grateful for someone else in your life instead.
The last thing you want to do is think about the people who don’t matter when there are people who do.
Multitasking during meetings
You should never give anything half of your attention, especially meetings.
If a meeting isn’t worth your full attention, you shouldn’t be attending it in the first place.
If the meeting is worth your full attention, then you need to get everything you can out of it.
Multitasking during meetings hurts you by creating the impression you believe you are more important than everyone else.
Gossiping
Gossipers derive pleasure from other people’s misfortunes.
It might be fun to peer into somebody else’s personal or professional faux pas at first, but over time it gets tiring, makes you feel gross, and hurts other people.
There are too many positives and too much to learn from interesting people to waste your time talking about the misfortune of others.
Comparing yourself to other people
When your sense of pleasure and satisfaction are derived from comparing yourself to others, you are no longer the master of your own happiness.
When you feel good about something that you’ve done, don’t allow anyone’s opinions or accomplishments take that away from you.
While it’s impossible to turn off your reactions to what others think of you, you don’t have to compare yourself to others, and you can always take people’s opinions with a grain of salt.
That way, no matter what other people are thinking or doing, your self-worth comes from within.
Regardless of what people think of you at any particular moment, one thing is certain — you’re never as good or bad as they say you are.
By practicing self-control to break these bad habits, you can simultaneously strengthen your self-control muscle and abolish nasty habits that have the power to bring your career to a grinding halt.
What other bad habits should people abolish?
*Travis Bradberry is the award-winning co-author of the bestselling book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0, and the co-founder of TalentSmart. He can be contacted at talentsmart.com.
This article first appeared at talentsmart.com
