Have you ever blown yourself up?

Life, Money and Gratitude  # 63 Have you ever blown yourself up?

You meant to do something useful and meaningful.

Then BOOM! You self sabotage yourself.

A little social media, some Netflix, a little gaming and the next thing you know two or three hours have gone by and you haven't done any of the things you meant to do.

For me it's YouTube.

I say to myself,

"I just want to check something real quick"

then a couple of hours later I'm crawling out of the YouTube rabbit-hole and I've forgotten why I went on in the first place.

We can tell ourselves that it's bad and we shouldn't do it, but truthfully we like it.

We get our little dopamine fix and our guilty pleasures puts a smile on our face.

So what is a person to do if they also want to get some things done.

In my search to find a solution I came across James Clears book Atomic Habits, it's a pretty good book, James goes into great detail about the power of habits Blah, Blah, Blah it's just too many words.

I find the self help industry seems to revolve around taking one sentence and turning it into a 200 page book.

Here is my simple summary :

Make it easy to do the things you should and hard to do the things you shouldn't.

Ha-ha, Are you laughing yet?

So all you have to do is figure out how to make the things you ought to do easy, and make the things you shouldn't be doing hard.

That sounds great, wonderful, why didn't I think of that?

Alright, alright, after you finish laughing it might be worth a try.

Here is what I'm going to attempt to do.

I am going to move all of my social media apps, yes including YouTube to my Ipad and remove them from my work computer and cell phone.

Then I am going to store my Ipad on the far side of my home so I will have to go out of my way to use it.

This in theory will make my bad habit hard.

I sense along the way, like an addict, I'll be huddled in a corner on a Youtube binge at some point, I'm only human.

But if I cut back on my Youtubing it will probably be worth the effort.

I haven't come up with how to make the things I should be doing easy, I'll work on that and you might want to try it yourself.

Do you have a bad habit you'd like to change? Try making it hard to do, see if that helps you.

Until next time, God Bless and be well.