“successful people are simply those who have successful habits”
Brian Tracy
I am writing this as a former overachiever and perfectionist.
I was addicted to stress to be honest, it gave me a purpose and my self worth depended on it. I had to constantly be studying something new, learning my craft – was my hobby, hours and hours spent on relentlessly researching almost everything to do with health, nutrition, physical and emotional fitness. It wasn’t until I was eventually overweight, over stressed, inflamed, fatigued, depressed, always in pain and very unhappy with life that I took a good look at my habits and the driving forces of what was ultimately causing allot of my health problems.
We create our internal turmoil; mostly that is, its the way we perceive things and our mindset towards life in general that affects our experiences in life. Obviously there are allot of factors that can contribute to our experience in life like our environments, past experiences, trauma, relationships and loss.
There are a few habits that can really make or break you, that I truly believe lead to poor mental and physical health. These aren’t the ‘health habits’ I usually write about, these are more behavioural patterns that can really affect our success in life.
- Perfectionism – the need to be or appear to be perfect, or even to believe that it’s possible to achieve perfection. It is typically viewed as a positive trait rather than a flaw. People may use the term “healthy perfectionism” to describe or justify perfectionistic behaviour. How to spot this is that your always looking for what’s wrong, what needs work or needs to change . So nothing ever feels good enough, your never truly feel content or satisfied, tasks take you twice as long as they should or worse you never even get started as it feels too overwhelming.
- Human doing – instead of human being – you have your self worth tied up in achieving or being busy. How to spot this is your constantly over booking your schedule to be busy, your always trying to achieve something new (this can be a positive yes, but not if its affecting your physical and mental health). This behaviour can lead to chronic stress, burnout, procrastination and poor health physically and emotionally.
- People pleasing – You have a fear of rejection and you cannot set clear personal boundaries. How to spot this, you keep saying yes instead of saying no to keep everyone happy. You end up doing things you really don’t want to just to keep the peace or just to please others. You end up resenting the people around because you can not say no. Often you withdraw from people because you feel used and not appreciated for your efforts.
- Overthinking – While it’s human nature to think things through when making a decision or evaluating a situation, it becomes overthinking when you can’t get out of your own head. how to spot this – you constantly ask what if questions, you over analyse everything – always thinking of what can go wrong. You often don’t take action because in your mind it may fail and you have thought of 1000s reasons why it won’t work. Have you heard of paralysis by analysis?
- Completion addiction – you don’t take any time out until you have a sense of completion for the day – Which never happens. The obsession of completion pulls us away from our most important work. Completion addiction causes us to obsess over relatively unimportant emails and to-dos. It causes us to put off the tasks that really matter and to race through our work so we end the day feeling stressed, anxious, and exhausted.
Have you spotted some of these in your behavioural patterns lately? Don’t stress its normal, acknowledging there is a pattern to work on is the first step to change.
If your needing more advice pop me a message and lets chat.
X M
the holistic approach 