How to Battle Nervous Habits

Battling nervous habits can be like watching a clock tick--you just want to act out on impulses again and again. You can't wait and you want to do it now. This article can give you some ideas on ways to defeat nervous habits, including tips from health writers, doctors and behavioral therapy websites.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

1. Behavioral therapy can help in coping with nervous habits. Behavioral therapy is often used to fight nervous habits, where you are learning to change behavior. Behavior Analysis Online, a site that documents and provides informative help for this problem, has this to say, "Examples include but are not limited to the areas of exercise and dietary compliance, smoking cessation, stress reduction, diabetes management, obesity treatment..." That is only a brief summation of the problems with nervous habits. Most of us would call smoking, reactions to stress and eating food on impulse as being related to nervous habits.
2. Medications. Nervous habits can be defeated with certain medications, as well as behavioral therapy. Biting your nails all the way down, chain smoking cigarettes, compulsively eating food, drinking non-stop coffee and avoiding people are a few examples. There are many ways to battle the nervous habits many of us suffer from. Medications help many to quit certain bad habits like smoking cigarettes. If you sense something is wrong with your thinking---say you have racing thoughts and start biting your nails then---a doctor can prescribe something to slow you down. Often this is a symptom of some other more extreme illness. If you are ashamed about the habits and want to stop, a doctor can help.
3. Understand it takes time. Stopping a bad habit isn't going to happen overnight. Many have quit smoking cigarettes, biting nails and cracking fingers only to fall again to their own nervous thoughts. People are used to habits and bad habits die hard. They can be hard to shake, no matter how much we fight them. The first step in understanding bad habits is to take one step. You can't say "No more!" and expect somehow your subconscious will change. One strategy to help the subconscious change is behavioral therapy, a technique that includes asking questions before and after a nervous habit. So, what do you think prior to smoking a cigarette? What do you feel when going out that is terrifying?
4. Battling it yourself. Many people with bad habits know that if they keep doing it, things will just get worse. Say you are avoiding people because you are nervous. This is actually a major problem for some people, called social anxiety disorder. What it takes is facing the fear and doing something you do want to do, because you have to. When you see it as a challenge on changing behavior, it might become easier.
5. Ask for help. A doctor or a therapist can help you only so much to conquer nervous habits. Beyond them, the people you see every day can be a big help. Doctors are often busy and therapists can only see you so often, but friends and family see you ever day.
6. Reward yourself. You are apt to fail the first few times. The most important part of all of this is to keep plugging away at your bad habits. Consider rewarding yourself from day one. This works like the behavioral therapy, but requires no doctor. What you are doing is encouraging the positives. Rewards can be something like going to a movie or out for a bike ride. Maybe you could even take a day or two off work. This is important, as you are improving yourself.
7. Find the resolution. Nervous habits are something many have trouble with. Look at the smokers who pull out two packs of cigarettes for a day or the schizophrenics who cannot stop picking at their nails. When you look at the extremes, it becomes easier to see how to resolve the problem in a healthy manner.

Tips & Warnings

• Always talk to a doctor first, then find alternatives.