Habits are like little machines set up automate many of the tasks we do a lot. They can allow us to do things without needing to put much energy or thought into them. Its kind of like having buttons that can be pressed, which set off a series of events. For example, you notice that it is getting close to bed time. Out of habit, you perform your nightly before bed task list. You noticing the late time is like pressing the lets-do-this-stuff-before-bed button. The same goes for waking up in the morning. Getting up is like pressing the lets-do-morning-stuff button.

When habits are working for us, things are pretty good. They are making sure we do the things we need to do, and do them when they need to be done. Unfortunately though, habits do not always work the way we need them to. Quite often they tend to wear out, break, or somehow turn bad before we ever even notice. There are many reasons for this. An entire book could be written on the various reasons why habits don’t work the way we want them to. No matter what the reason though, the point is that many habits seem to occasionally need maintenance.

Just setting up and letting a habit do its thing is okay for a while, but eventually it may degrade and need to be adjusted. Like a machine, broken habits need to be fixed in order to make sure they keep running the way you want them to. This is where you come in.

Finding Habits in Need of Maintenance

You will need to determine which habits are helping your life, and which ones are hurting. In order to do this you need to take a close look at your current set of habits. Start by trying to observe the various things you do automatically. To find the things you do automatically, try just looking at the things you do a lot. Many of the things you do a lot may be automatic without you even knowing it. Habits may take some time identify, just remember keep an eye out for them as you go about your day.

Once you have identified some of your habits, it’s time to begin the process of repairing the broken ones. To begin, you will need to first find out which habits are actually broken. Some may be obvious, and some not so much. The real basic question to ask yourself when encountering a habit is this:

Does this habit help, or harm?

You can use this basic question as the building block for all other questions to help you determine if the habit needs maintenance. You can then further refine the basic question down into many more specific questions based upon the specific habit. Such as if you consider the habit to be doing more good than bad.

Removing Bad habits

Sometimes you may find that a habit is just broken beyond repair and needs to be thrown out completely. It might also be that the habit was never even that good to begin with. Finding and removing these things can take a bit of effort, and even if you do manage to remove them there is no guarantee that they will not return. Removing habits and making sure they stay removed requires you to work at it, and maybe even more than once. But if you do not remove bad habits, you are probably just going to repeat the related undesired actions.

When Bad Habits Return (cue scary music)

Removing a bad habit is kind of like temporarily putting an out of order sign on the button that triggers it. It may be away for a little while, but the button is still there. To help make sure that the bad habit does not come back, it can be useful to re-wire its button to a newly formed good habit. You may even be able to salvage some of the parts from the bad habit to use in the new one. Just be careful that what you reuse really is just a good part of a bad habit.