Hi everyone! It is Rachel back with another video here on live study hacks. To begin, I would like to share a story. So recently, I am in the process of reevaluating my life. Okay, well you may be wondering that I am a highschooler, what do I have to reevaluate, but to be honest there are so many things in my life that I am working on. Throughout my life, I would do things that were not necessarily important, and often complete them. I would put everything else in my life as my priority like extracurriculars whether that be playing my violin or watching youtube than studying for an important test the next day. Because to me studying was boring, and there were so many other short term things that I could do to oppose studying. But actually sitting down in picking up that math textbook was personally a struggle for me. I did not love studying, and in middle school I did my homework but it was often not my best work. And I just completed the homework for the sake of doing it. I was neither interested in what I was learning, and asked me a question about what the homework was about. Most of the time I couldn’t answer.
This high school year, I made it a challenge to myself, to never have this instance happen to me again. So guess what I did to, it was hard at first I was tempted to look at my phone and other things. But if I waas person, who finally started seeing A’s in my report card after getting rid of some bad habits. It is possible that you can do it too. So today, I am going to walk through with you some of the steps I took in order to get to that area. These steps are calleds 1) Recognize 2) Replace 3) Reflect. I call these the 3 R’s.
Recognize: My first step in order to break your habit is to recognize. You must first identify your bad habit; it could be biting your nails, procrastinating, eating unhealthy, and not working out. You must recognize your bad habit, and write it down. Many of you have probably clicked this video because you already had a bad habit in your mind. So what I would like you to do is to have the end goal image of that result. So if that means having no acne, like what Thomas Frank did was take his photoshopped face with no acne, and whenever he wanted to take an energy drink, he looked at it, and said no. It for a while helped him. So for me I often have a bad habit of getting distracted by watching youtube videos instead of doing my homework. What I did at one point was that I had an image of a report card of all A’s. And it stopped for a while, but I didn’t do it for a long time. So it is probably something that I am gonna start implementing. To end this tip, you must Recognize and write down your bad habit. And have your end goal somewhere so you remind yourself, that if I have this short term reward, then I am getting farther and farther away from my end goal.
Replace: To give you some context about this next strategy, you must understand what exactly are bad habits. Bad habits often occur from the region of your brain called Basal Ganglia. This region of your brain allows repetition and allows your brain to often do bad habits. Bad habit is any opposition to your goals. For example, twirling a pencil. When you are twirling a pencil, you go through your classes not paying attention but you have a bad habit. So twirling a pencil is a bad habit , and it is kinda equivalent to dopamine. So dopamine is a surge of energy you get from a particular thing. And you must decrease this dopamine on these bad instances into things that are actually good. And this my friends brings me to the essence of this strategy. Substitute your bad habits to good habits. To give you a story, Charles Duhigg the author of the Power of Habits said that he often had a cookie after work. And it was often unhealthy for him, but he recognized that he did not actually want the cookie, but wanted the cookie so he could socialize with his friends. So instead he changed this habit, to just gossip with his friends. So like that, replace your bad habits into good ones, so that it could be biting vegetables instead of your nails.All in all, it is important to replace your bad habits into a good one, I can’t really stres this one enough.
Reflect: so you must reflect after replacing. You must find better ways in order to get rid of your bad habits, and that is the process of reflecting. So you must understand after the whole process after trial and error that habits follow 3 steps 1. Cue 2. Routine 3. Reward. This is the basic idea of the Power of Habits book. These habits do not necessarily have to be good. Next, Block your bad habits and start a challenge. You must focus on what is preventing you, and if that is a website try blocking it. You should also start the 30 day challenge, and remove access from it. You can get your friends on board, so they can be your type of army to help eliminate this bad habit. They can be your bodyguards, and give 5,000 dollars, and tell them that they can keep it if you do not get abs in 8 months for example. My last tip is about Progressive extremism(natural progression of giving up things), so you should focus on working at one thing at a time instead of going in expert. So that could be quitting one thing at a time, one person talks about giving uyp candy corns, and now he does not eat any refined sugars now. So heighten the awareness, slowly and slowly, and start giving it up for life, then for a month. Change your mindset do not do vs can’t.