Weekly Cup of Joe - Episode #30 - Breaking Habits

Good morning and welcome to your Weekly Cup of Joe. My name is Joe King. I'm the owner of Physical Therapy Advantage in North Aurora. Here to talk to you today about breaking habits, or dealing with habits or forming good habits, however you want to term it. It's not easy by any stretch of the imagination and there's extensive research that was done, it was quite a while ago back in 2009 I believe that they looked at habits and breaking habits and the range was anywhere from 18 days to 250 some days. So I think the average, they said it was 66 days it took to break a habit or basically to form a new habit; so it's not an easy task at all. So the biggest thing is that you need to really become mentally aware of what you're doing and being conscious and cognitively aware of what you're doing and when you're doing it.

So whether you're just trying to stop smoking, you're trying to stop looking at your phone every time it dings, whether it be for Facebook or Instagram or whatever it may be, get those notifications, to stop eating late or sweets late at night, or could be a health related thing that you're trying to break or the bad habit you're trying to break whether it be being in a bad posture on the computer all the time or on your phone to standing with your knees locked out, it could be anything. The biggest thing is you need to be consistent, but first and foremost, you need to be mentally and cognitively aware. So using mirrors helps a lot of time to go correct it. So having mirrors around and working on that, but if you're trying to smoke that obviously doesn't really matter as much, but I'm going to put two books below that I recommend that you read, that will help with that one by Charles Duhigg.

And I can't think of another one, but the book is called Atomic Habits. And those two books will be down below, highly recommend reading those they'll help, maybe get you motivated, help find out ways to be consistent and better ways to be mentally aware and cognizantly aware of what you're doing and habit you're trying to break. So I wish you good luck. If you have any questions or any other health related questions, maybe PT related or not please don't hesitate to give us a call at (630) 892-8003. And we look forward to seeing you next week on your Weekly Cup of Joe. Bye.