Do you also promise yourself every year that you will eat healthier or stop smoking? Some of us are successful. It largely depends on your motivation, faith in success, and persistence in achieving your goals. You can achieve a lot, change your habits, if you really want to. You don’t have to wait until next year with your decisions. Get started today!
You can change your habits with the right motivation.
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Before you learn a few tips on how to achieve the intended goal, it is worth mentioning in a few words what, according to psychology, motivation is. Because it is motivation that greatly contributes to your success.
Motivation what is it?
According to psychologists, motivation is all mechanisms responsible for activating, directing, maintaining and ending a specific behavior.
External motivation and internal motivation
We can divide the motivation into:
- External motivation when we act under the influence of the environment, when the source of the force that compels us to act comes from outside. External motivation is related to the system of penalties and rewards, i.e. we work only for remuneration, we learn for grades.
- Internal motivation, then we perform a given activity for pleasure, we derive joy from the action itself, its content, we fulfill an internal need.
As we know, the appetite grows with eating, so if externally motivated people receive a reward, e.g. in the form of a raise, it prompts them to work even better, more intensively. It is similar in the case of internal motivation – if you learn for your own knowledge, from internal need, then after mastering one skills, you will be happy to start acquiring new ones.
In the long run, internal motivation is undoubtedly better, as it does not expect rewards from outside. With intrinsic motivation, you can move mountains, and certainly change unwanted habits.
Habits what are these?
Contrary to appearances, it is not easy. First of all, you need to realize what is a habit? To put it simply, it is a certain automatic operation that has been developed on the basis of exercises and experiences. An example may be a situation where someone of your friends offers you a cigarette while drinking coffee or you simply reach for a newspaper during breakfast. When this activity brings positive effects, we repeat it, i.e. always read the press while drinking morning coffee.
With time, we no longer make an informed decision, but act automatically. Habits are therefore also characterized by a low level of awareness. If we do something for several years, we do not focus on, for example, which gear to choose when driving a car or how to do a given job, it is a brain’s way of saving energy.
Moreover, habits never expire, they cannot be forgotten, and the created neural connections can be activated even after years [2] – but don’t worry, there are methods for that. Habits can be changed, replaced.