6. Habits Have a Direct Effect
Harmful
habits have a direct, negative effect on the body. Smoking, drinking too
much alcohol, and taking certain drugs can introduce toxic or damaging
substances into the body that can compromise the body’s ability to
function properly, lead to addiction, and encourage disease processes.
Habits can also directly impact our emotional or mental functioning.
Becoming intoxicated, overly distracted, or otherwise impaired can make
you more prone to accidents, rages, and mistakes, which can, in turn,
cause stress.
7. Habits Have an Indirect Effect
Habits also
have an indirect effect on your stress level. Knowing you drank too
much, stayed up too late, and ate too much the night before can add to
your frustration, and low self-esteem in your work life the next
morning. Your stress will be higher than it would have been had you not
spent the night before being controlled by a habit. Habits can make us
feel helpless when they control us, causing stress because we worry
about our lack of self-control, the effect our habit may have on others,
and the deleterious health effects of whatever the habit may be.
8. Habits Have a Combination Effect
Some habits
can have both direct and indirect negative effects. Probably most bad
habits fall into this category. Compulsive overeating, for example, is
dangerous to the body because the body isn’t designed to take in huge
amounts of food at one time. It can also create negative emotional
states such as frustration, depression, and anxiety. Even less dramatic
bad habits like habitual messiness can have a combination effect. If you
can never keep things clean, for example, you might suffer frustration
over never being able to find things.
9. Steer Clear of a Drug Dilemma
Drugs can be important tools for
maintaining or regaining good health. When used for purposes other than
for correcting a health problem, however, drugs can cause imbalances in
the body that contribute to health problems.
Some substances used occasionally in
moderation (such as alcohol or caffeine) probably aren’t harmful for
most people, but other drugs—especially “hard” drugs such as cocaine and
heroin—can be very harmful to the body. A glass of wine with dinner is
probably fine for someone who isn’t addicted to alcohol, isn’t prone to
alcohol addiction, and really enjoys it. Illegal drugs pose multiple
risks, not the least of which is the potential for getting in trouble
with the law.
Any
substance that artificially alters your mental state taken too often or
in large amounts will, at best, keep you from dealing with your stress
and, at worst, add significantly to your stress. Legal though it is, few
would dispute the dangers of overconsumption of alcohol.
10. Don’t Overeat
Eating too much weighs down your body
and makes you feel sluggish. Overeating at night keeps your digestive
system working overtime and can disturb your quality of sleep. Eating
too many simple sugars can raise your insulin level and promote
bingeing, which perpetuates the cycle of overeating. Eating too much can
also, of course, cause you to become overweight.
Eating
disorders are the culprit in many cases. Well-known disorders such as
bulimia and anorexia, as well as lesser-known but quite common disorders
such as binge eating disorder, often have complex psychological causes
as well as physical causes. Please seek help from your doctor,
counselor, or other health care professional if you think you or someone
you love has an eating disorder.
11. Watch Out for Workaholism
Working hard
may seem to you more like a necessity than a habit, and for some people,
that’s certainly the case. For others, however, overworking really is a
habit. Maybe you work to forget that you don’t have a social life.
Maybe you work because you are obsessed with getting that promotion.
Whatever the case, if you are in the habit of overworking and your work
is impinging on your life—that is, you feel you have no personal time,
no time to just relax without thinking about work, no privacy because
people from work call you at home at all hours—then overworking has
become a habit; one, however, that you can gradually reshape.
12. Moderate Your Media Intake
Like anything else, technology and
media are fine—in moderation. But also, like anything else, too much of a
good thing soon becomes a bad thing. If your media habit is taking up
more than its fair share of your time and you are sacrificing other,
equally important or more important parts of your life because of your
media fixation, then it’s a bad habit.
Consider the
daily news. People depend on the news to be informed about world
events, to hear the next day’s weather, and to keep up on local
happenings. But obsessive news watching can result in preoccupation with
events far removed from your own life, anxiety about the state of the
world, even depression as a result of focusing too much on all the bad
things that happen. Seek balance in your media habits.
