The Duden defines "habit" as a „Action, attitude, peculiarity that has become self-evident through frequent and constant repetition; something that is often only performed mechanically or unconsciously".

In other words, our routine, unconsciously performed actions. These include banal things like locking the door when you leave the house in the morning or putting your mobile phone on the side an hour before you go to bed. We are certainly more aware of some of them than others, and we can only very rarely admit to our bad habits. We often fail to recognise them until someone points them out to us or we read an article on bad habits and recognise ourselves in them.

Even if some of the listed habits do not seem "bad" at first glance, they can still cause us difficulties. We may never have looked at them that way. Although some of them seem normal, because everyone does them, they affect our well-being, mood and health. They are mentally exhausting and cost us time and energy. For example, putting off doing things does not bring us any relaxation in the long run.

To illustrate this, imagine you have to meet a deadline for a paper, for example, and you don't start writing it until the day before it is due. Fine, you were able to relax all the weeks before, but the pressure you are now under to finish on time puts your body under so much stress that it becomes difficult to keep calm. You will probably have to stay up all night to finish and the lack of sleep will be so noticeable in the next few days that you will only be able to concentrate sparsely on other things. You could have spared yourself this stress if you had worked on it a bit at a time over several weeks. It's probably not the first time something like this has happened. In general, these kinds of habits leave a bitter and tiring taste and make us dissatisfied in the long run.

Because we have trained our brain for our habits and it does not distinguish between good and bad. When we perform an action for the first time, it happens consciously because our brain does not yet have a "fixed path" for it. A new exercise is processed in the cerebral cortex, the centre for our conscious actions. Once this action has been performed several times, it is transferred to the part of the brain responsible for our unconscious actions. To save energy, repeated actions are stored by our brain as "automatisms". This takes place in the so-called basal ganglia . They are responsible for our everyday actions.Habits therefore represent a relief for the cerebral cortex with which we carry out our conscious actions.

Since our brain likes to stick to familiar ways of thinking, it is a long-term process until we have integrated new habits into our everyday life in such a way that they become automatisms. According to a study by University College London, it takes an average of 66 days for our brain to become familiar with a new action and to be able to perform it unconsciously.

This is also one of the reasons why conventional diets are doomed to failure. Because they are not part of our lives for long enough and after 4 to 6 weeks they have not yet become a habit. Falling back into old patterns is therefore pre-programmed. For this reason, a change of diet should be a long-term part of your life and not a short-term diet. Step by step, in the long run, and not from now on for a short time.

Healthy habits are the things that move us forward in the areas of health, productivity and quality of life. At best, they allow us to save time and improve our mental well-being.

Through concrete organisation, coping with our everyday life becomes easier, as we consciously create free time in which we, for example, take time for our needs or work productively on the things that interest us outside of our working life. Also, through a regular sleep routine and regular meditation, we can improve our quality of life, become calmer inside and achieve optimal results in terms of our regeneration. As a result, we are more present in everyday life and can concentrate better on our tasks. At the same time, we do something good for our health.

To successfully incorporate these into our daily lives, we need perseverance and discipline. Since our brain likes to stay in its "comfort zone", we need to actively remind ourselves that we want to change something. Only then can we create new thought pathways in our brain. Accordingly, self-reflection is on the agenda. Maybe ask yourself when you notice yourself falling back into an old bad habit, what need you are trying to satisfy with it.

Do you really want to eat a bar of chocolate or are you just compensating for your need for human closeness and warmth and letting out your frustration?
Unmask your patterns.

But to avoid immediate failure, it is important to start really small. Tiny changes that you increase over time have a much greater chance of success than the desire to change so much right away. But their effect will be just as visible - and without the stress of wanting to change everything right away.

Just try it out and start with a new habit and see how it changes your everyday life in the long run.