1. Most personal development coaches recommend the 21-day rule, as originally suggested by Maxwell Maltz. Do an activity for 21 days straight and it becomes an easily-adopted habit.

2. Steve Pavlina has always recommended 30 days. He’s done it for everything, from trying out vegetarianism to sleeping like Frank Sinatra.

3. Gleb Reys from Personal Development Tips suggested giving the activity a name that means something to you to help personalize it and give it more weight for transitioning into a habit.

4. Various authors recommend visualizing and NLP work. I think a lot of us have done this at one time or another with varying degrees of success.

5. My current personal preference is to combine several activities all geared towards developing the new habit.

a. Perform the new action for 21 days. Like many, 21 days has been a magic number for me. I’ve always liked the number 13 so I actually started out doing things for 13 days but it never quite worked out as well.

b. Read 1 hour a day about things that will reinforce the new habit.

c. Write about it. I found I learned and internalized things faster the more I turned it over in my head.

d. Throw some appreciative love towards it. I like imagining how much quality the new habit will add into my life. It makes it more powerful, more real and brings me closer towards really wanting to fulfill it.

1. Procrastinating

Procrastinators are notorious for running away from problems that never solve themselves. If an issue is stressing you out now, imagine how much worse it can make you feel after a year when left to itself.

2. Waiting for the Perfect Solution

There is no magic elixir and there is no spoon. There is no super cure that will fix everything in your life. There is no genie that will come along and give you all the solutions for your ills. You need to make do with the resources you can muster right now. Amazingly, when you resolve to handle things this way, you will realize those resources are all you really needed anyway.

3. Worrying About Things Outside Your Control

If it’s not within your abilities to do something about it right now, then accept it. Focus on things you can make an impact on. Check the rest out of the corner of one eye and act when it’s within your reach. Think globally, act locally.

4. Finding Blame
When you look for people to put the blame on, you waste unnecessary energy you can instead invest on finding solutions. If someone is to blame, it is apparent at the onset. Accept it, avoid that person in the future, but keep your present in problem-solving mode.

5. Unhealthy Lifestyle

All the alcohol, drugs and cigarettes that are promoted as stress relievers actually stress your body more while never doing anything tangible for the issues at hand. It’s escapism at its finest - a quick fix to keep someone’s pockets fat!

6. Keeping Secrets

Introverted people are notorious for keeping problems to themselves. While its a good strategy for keeping a problem within finite boundaries, it’s also doubly hard feeling like you need to go through your problems alone. It doesn’t hurt to tell someone without wanting anything from them.

7. Blaming Yourself

Like finding blame in others, there’s no use dwelling on blame even if it’s on yourself. Cursing at yourself and going over and over your mistakes has never been a good strategy for solving anything. In fact, it only makes matters worse because it can easily lead to depression and self-loathing. Keep your eyes on what can be done, never on what has happened.

8. Refusing to Lose a Battle

It’s ok to surrender to your problems sometimes. There’s a lot of value in accepting defeat once then getting back up on your feet to win the war.

Technorati Tags: stress

Just saw this resource page called “Thought Stopping,” that pretty comprehensively tackles handling and fixing negative thought patterns. I don’t have much issues in this area as my old thought-stopping technique still works pretty great for me.
The site answers the following crucial questions:

• What is thought stopping?
• How does thought stopping work?
• What are some thought stopping techniques?
• Irrational thinking which blocks you from letting thought stopping work for you
• Directions for thought stopping

I really like the step by step directions they give for accomplishing the task, as well as their list of irrational reasons for allowing the process to fail. The reasons they give include:

• It’s OK if I just think about it and do nothing about it.
• What’s the harm of thinking about it?
• People will never know if I just think about it for a little while.
• I’ve denied myself so much, why can’t I just think about it once in a while?
• You can’t condemn me for thinking.
• I never thought about it before I acted so why should I avoid thinking about it now?