How 30 day challenges have changed my life

How 30 day challenges have changed my life days

Good morning/afternoon/night today I want to share with you one of the most successful methods I have used for creating positive changes in my life.

It is as simple as committing to something for 30 days. There seems to be something magical about doing this for this amount of time.

I think it is due to how the human mind works and the rewiring of the subconscious. Being the habitual creatures that we are it is well documented that it takes us at least 3 weeks to form or break a habit and ultimately a routine.

Everywhere I look I see patterns and loops. All it takes is the recognition of the patterns habits and routines in your own life and a conscious effort to form new ones or break old ones to make drastic changes in our lives.

I have tried many 30-day challenges over the years some with much greater success than others.

The best thing about them is that they are not such a scary commitment since you know its only temporary and if its not working out you can go back to the way things are once the 30 days are over.

The negative pattern loop

One thing I have noticed from making such commitments is just how quickly one negative habit can be replaced by another if one is not careful.

Often I find that by giving something up that has been counter productive to my lifestyle is quickly replaced by something equally counter productive.

Let me give you an example. I decided I was no longer going to play video games. I gave up playing video games for 30 days and to my amazement the first couple of I was having great success.

In time however the feeling I would get to procrastinate did not disappear and I soon found myself binging on Netflix instead. This pattern also seemed to be consistent when attempting to change other negative habits as well.

It got me thinking deep into the situation and it made me ponder about energy exchange and how it works. I always remembered reading about how energy can never be created nor destroyed. Only transferred from one form to another.

The solution?

We must learn to replace negative habits with positive ones. This seems fairly obvious but time and time again if I were not careful my bad habits just kept on changing from one form to another. It wasn’t until I began switching them to positive ones did I truly experience positive results.

So giving things up was often not enough if I was not prepared to replace it with something that positively challenged me.

So here I am still on my journey and still weeding out the things in my life that add no benefit to my productivity.

One habit that has stuck with me despite my hard efforts is the consumption of coffee. I really do have a love hate relationship with this beverage.

The problem is my focus is to remove things that hinder my productivity, yet one can argue that coffee is good for productivity. Everybody is entitled to their own opinion here and I can only speak from a place of personal experience.

Yet I feel that any of the positives that can be gained from coffee (mood lift, increased energy and focus) can be gained from a simple mediation and a light jog.

I think the reason I have never been truly able to give it up is because I never replaced the habit with a more positive one. I really missed the extra lift it gave me on those difficult days that I did not want to get out of bed.

Having recently moved to Utah and switched up my life I have found a new appreciation for coffee and coffee shops but I know I am slowly becoming more dependent.

So here I am about to embark on yet again another 30 days challenge. I plan to quit drinking coffee for 30 days and replace it with meditation and running to observe the effects it has on my overall well being.

Try a 30-day challenge for yourself

Make a list of the things you do each day. Write down anything that takes up your time that makes you feel guilty or has a negative influence over you in some way.

Now having identified some of the habits you wish to change, write down and brain storm some ideas that may be good replacements for this habit. For example when I gave up soda I began drinking kombucha instead. This made my transition much smoother and kombucha is definitely a much healthier choice.

You see by systematically identifying each negative habit and replacing it with a positive one we eventually transform our entire life to be the most healthy and productive that we can possibly be.

So there you have it. If you want to make positive changes to your life my advice would be to do it one small habit at a time. There are no short cuts when it comes to personal development but in time by consciously applying what we learn we can dramatically improve our entire life situation.

Thank you for reading, please encourage me by following, upvoting, resteeming or commenting :)