Ever had a moment when you were driving or riding a bike back home from the office or outside, and before you know it you’re in front of your home?

That’s because in most of our lives we are running on auto-pilot everyday. Running habits or programs that are either serving us or taking from us.

It’s an absolutely necessary part of us, otherwise, we just wouldn’t be able to handle all of the mental processing.

But it can also become dangerous if we do not review what we do habitually. It can be what we eat that makes us unhealthy, the way we talk that breaks down our relationships, the way we handle our finances that keeps us in a cycle of living paycheck to paycheck, and more.

So how do you break it?

A simple yet powerful way to do so is to do what in NLP, they call a pattern interrupt.

I have a son who’s two years old, and if you take things away from him, he will start crying. He’s in that terrible two’s mentality.

So What do we parents do? Distract him right? If he starts taking my power bank for example or something sharp, I would take it away and he’ll react like “yaaarghhh!” the next thing I would do is to distract him, it could be with a toy, a ball, or something for him to draw on a paper just to distract him.

That is a pattern interrupt to break the pattern and focus his mindset and energy into something else and know what happens after that? He totally forgets about what he was whining about previously.

Neurologically, it ensures that the neural connections of that habitual pathway are not strengthened.

So the next time you find yourself getting into a bad habit, interrupt it. The easiest way is to do something physical, like wearing a band around your wrist and snapping it, or just shaking yourself up.

What do you do to break your bad habits?