Did you know that you put your pants on the same way every day? The same left or right leg goes in first. The same thing with your shoes. You put the same left or right foot into the first shoe you put on.

Habits are unconscious thoughts, behaviors or emotions that exist for one purpose – to free up your conscious brain, so you can think.

Did you know that every day many of you engage in some habits that are actually dangerous?

You wake up in the morning and the first thing you do is reach for a bagel to butter to eat with your coffee. Or, right after dinner, without thinking, you spend hours sitting on the couch, watching TV.

Dangerous Habits take time to impair your health, your finances, your job, or your relationships. The effects of Dangerous Habits take many years before they negatively affect your life.

Awareness is the key to putting an end to dangerous habits. That is why in my books, Rich Habits and Change Your Habits Change Your Life, I highlight the importance of spending three days writing down all of your behaviors, thinking and emotions. You need three days in order to see a pattern that occurs during different times of the day. That repetition = a habit.

Only when you make yourself consciously aware of your dangerous habits, by seeing them on paper, can you put an end to them.

What are some Dangerous Habits?

• Eating junk food every day (cancer, heart disease, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, neurological disorders).
• Watching TV for hours a day, while sitting on a couch (cardiovascular disease, heart disease).
• Sitting for hours while engaged in social media or while on the Internet (cardiovascular disease, heart disease).
• Drinking too much alcohol (cancer, neurological disorders).
• Spontaneous spending (poverty).
• Speeding in your car during your morning commute to work (car accident).
• Using your cell phone while driving your car (car accident).
• Constant worrying (chronic stress which leads to cancer and other diseases).
• Anger or other uncontrolled toxic emotions (destroys relationships).
• Gossip (destroys relationships).
• Smoking cigarettes (lung cancer, heart disease).
• Arguing, fighting with others (destroys relationships or can lead to divorce).
• Sarcasm or making fun of others (destroys relationships).
• Procrastination (leads to poor work product and loss of trust).
• Taking drugs (can lead to addiction which damages health).
• Gambling (poverty).
• Lifestyle creep (no savings or creates excessive debt, which can lead to poverty).
• Living beyond your means (no savings or creates excessive debt, which can lead to poverty).
• Hate (chronic stress, which impairs health).
• Using credit cards (poverty).
• Not reading to learn (lack of knowledge, which impairs job performance).
• No life insurance (puts family at risk of poverty, if you die).
• Infidelity (divorce, which can lead to poverty).

Become aware of your habits. Eliminate Dangerous Habits. Then, live long and prosper.

The conscious part of your brain is the neocortex, or outer layer of the brain. It’s only been around for about 200,000 years. The conscious brain is limited – it can only focus on one thing at a time. It is incapable of multitasking.

The subconscious parts of your brain, the limbic system and brain stem, have been around for millions of years. It is highly evolved, powerful, versatile and able to multitask to an amazing degree. Intuition (gut feelings), controlling emotions, keeping your organs functioning simultaneously, memory formation and many, many other things, performed all at once.

Because the conscious brain is limited in what it can do, it likes to offload tasks and behaviors to the subconscious brain, which it knows to be all powerful.

Habits are automated behaviors and processes that have been offloaded by the conscious brain to the subconscious. This novel solution to cognitive overload, sets your conscious mind free. Once a behavior becomes a habit, the conscious mind is set free.

When you think of habits, think of them as your friend – they exist to set you free.

Habits give you freedom to think. Freedom to daydream. Freedom to create. Freedom to make decisions. Freedom to problem solve.

When you forge Rich Habits, over time, they create freedoms everyone desires:

• Freedom From Financial Struggles.
• Freedom from Poor Health.
• Freedom From Toxic People.
• Freedom From Unhappiness.
• Freedom From Debt.
• Freedom to Do Work You Love.
• Freedom to Spend Your Wealth Engaging in Activities You Enjoy.
• Freedom to Spend More Time With Loved Ones.

Even better, when you forge Rich Habits, you can pass on those habits to your children, and set them free.

Old habits die hard. The keys to habit change are Awareness and Tracking.

Awareness 

Awareness = Knowing what habits you currently have or don’t have. Some of the habits you have are good habits and some are bad habits.

Make a list of the bad habits you would like to remove. Also, this is a good time to make a list of some good habits you would like to adopt.

I listed many of the good habits in my books Rich Habits and Change Your Habits Change Your Life. If you don’t have my books, here’s a good list from SUCCESS Magazine:

16 Rich Habits https://www.success.com/16-rich-habits/

Tracking

Tracking = a system or process that makes habit change possible.

Because habits are sticky, you need some process to help you in your quest to remove bad habits and add good habits:

• Daily To Don’t List – This is a list of bad habits you currently have that you want to eliminate. Each day that you are able to avoid engaging in your bad habits, you check off the box next to the To Don’t Habit.
• Daily Should Do List – This is a list of good habits you would like to adopt. Each day that you engage in a good habit, you check off the box next to the Should Do Habit.

After about a month, the neural connections behind old bad habits will begin to weaken and the new neural connections behind new good habits will strengthen. Depending on the complexity of the habit, it could take anywhere from a few weeks to six months before an old habit dies or a new habit is formed.

Keep it simple. Focus on no more than three old bad habits and three new good habits.

Good luck and let me know how you are progressing.

According to a 2013 Associated Press survey, 80% of America’s adults were struggling with unemployment, poverty or near poverty. That’s a lot of unhappy people.

Unhappy people tend to have unhappy thoughts. Happy people tend to have happy thoughts.

Cognitive psychologists call this tendency to see the world through either a negative or positive lens, mood congruency.

According to the latest science, negativity causes tunnel vision, limiting creativity and inhibiting your ability to think clearly. When the lens through which you view the world is negative, you see nothing but problems and become blind to opportunities and solutions.

If you’re struggling financially, a negative mental outlook acts like gasoline, fueling the flames of negativity and perpetuating a life of financial struggle.

Conversely, a positive mental outlook enhances creative problem solving. It gives you the mental tools to lift yourself up in order to overcome your obstacles.

But how do you flip the switch on your mental outlook?

Gratitude is the gateway to optimism and a positive mental outlook. Gratitude forces you to become aware of the good things about your life: my car started today, I was able to feed my family, I have a roof over my head, I’m healthy, I’m alive, I have a loving family, etc.

When you focus on the good that is in your life, instead of the bad, you force your brain to shift from negative to positive.

If you make gratitude a daily habit, eventually your positive mental outlook will overpower your negative mental outlook.

Gratitude changes the lens through which you view your world, from negative to positive. And when that happens you’ll begin to see solutions to your problems. Ideas will pop into your head that will help you climb your way out of your financial worries.

Expressing gratitude every day is not some pseudo, new age B.S. Gratitude is the gateway to optimism and a positive mental outlook. It’s the means to transforming your life from one filled with limitations to one with no limits.

On January 1, 2016, Jaylon Smith, widely regarded as the #1 outside linebacker in college football and considered a top draft pick for the NFL, tore both his ACL and LCL – ligaments that attach the knee to the thigh bone. Even worse, there was significant nerve damage. Nerve damage that might be permanent.

Taring either the ACL or LCL is bad, but taring both, at the same time, while damaging the nerves that run from the knee to the thigh bone, well, most never recover from something like that.

But Jaylon Smith was different.

“I am a leader. I am the best outside linebacker in football. Nothing’s changed. I’ll be OK.”

The Dallas Cowboys drafted Smith in the 2016 draft, taking a huge gamble on a linebacker that might never play again.

Following a very complicated knee surgery, Smith underwent nearly a year of intensive rehab, while Dallas patiently stood by.

Fast forward – today, Smith is the leader of Dallas’s defense. He may be the best outside linebacker in the NFL.

Smith never doubted he would play football again. He never wavered in his belief in himself as the best outside linebacker in football. That was his identity. That’s what he saw when he looked in the mirror. And that belief in who he was, his identity, healed his ligaments and his nerves.

If I were to ask you who you see yourself to be, would you have an honest answer?

If you don’t have a clear vision of who you are, you have an identity crisis.

We all face adversity in life. But, adversity will break you if you don’t have a clear vision of who you are.

However, for those who look in the mirror and know exactly who they are, adversity will only make you stronger.

Those who succeed in life, overcome adversity because they have a clear vision of who they are. Their identity is their GPS, constantly moving them forward to the realization of their dreams and their goals.

As I’ve stated many times – Relationships are the currency of the wealthy.

In my Rich Habits Study, one of the common attributes of the wealthy was that they surrounded themselves with positive, upbeat, enthusiastic, success-minded people.

Building these relationships, I learned, took many years – on average, about three years per relationship.

While that might seem like a long time, in reality, the time invested was spread out over many years.

In a paper published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, Jeffrey Hall, a professor of Communications Studies, actually conducted a study to determine how many hours it took to forge a single friendship. According to his research findings, it took about 80 hours.

If you were to spread that 80 hours out over 156 weeks (3 years X 52 weeks a year), the investment required to create a friend, is about 31 minutes a week.

So, how do you go about forging a friendship with another success-minded individuals?

• Physical Meetings – Weekly breakfast meetings, weekly lunch meetings, or having a few beers at some bar once a week.
• Volunteer –  You could also volunteer to assist your future friend in the non-profit they work with, some trade group they are involved in or their networking group, if they have one. Here you would need to find out what groups they are involved in and ask them if you can join their group.
• Non-Physical Meetings – This could also be accomplished through weekly phone calls, emails, or even social media interactions.

However you do it, your interactions must be consistent and regular.

Over time, your investment in your new friend will pay off.

Friends open doors that are otherwise closed. Friends help fund your dreams. Friends encourage and support you in your dreams, goals and initiatives. And friends invite you into their inner circle, exposing you to even more success-minded individuals, with whom you can forge new friendships.

Poverty isn’t just one thing. It’s complicated.

In my five-year Rich Habits Study, I was able to interview 128 poor people. I learned a lot about poverty. More than most. Understanding poverty, I believe, helps inoculate you from it.

For some, poverty is thrust upon them, through no fault of their own. For others, poverty is their own doing.

While each of the stories of the 128 poor people I interviewed is unique, I did find some commonalities.

According to my research, there are 5 types of poverty.

#1 Functional Poverty

The poor in this category are comprised of people who just don’t make enough money in the work that they do. These individuals are good people. They have strong family values. Their households are run by good parents who love their children. They are hard-working. Frugality is forced upon them, so they learn to squeeze more out of every dollar.

They don’t make a lot of money because the work they do is not highly valued by society. They are able to provide the bare necessities for their children.

Because functionally poor children are raised in a stable, nurturing, loving environment, they are given the tools by their parents to break out of poverty. Many do. Most of their children wind up in the middle-class, but some are able to excel and become rich.

The vast majority of the poor who do become rich, come from this category.

#2 Dysfunctional Poverty

The poor in this category were raised by dysfunctional parents. Addictions are a common variable among those raised in Dysfunctional Poverty. One or both parents may struggle with drugs, alcohol or gambling. Consequently, single-parent households are commonplace in this category.

Hatred is another common variable among the poor in this category. They hate and disrespect the law and society. They are frequent law breakers. Theft and assault are the tools of their trade.

Psychological problems are yet another common variable of those stuck in Dysfunctional Poverty. They are mentally and emotionally unfit. Those with psychological deficiencies somehow slip through the cracks of society; their mental deficiencies ignored or unaddressed.

Incarceration of one or both parents is a common theme in these households. Children are raised by a single parent, or assisted by others – a grandparent, foster parents, charitable organizations, governmental institutions, etc.

The vast majority of the poor, come from Dysfunctional Poverty. This is the number one source of poverty in America.

#3 Exploited Poverty

The poor in this category are individuals who are lulled into dependency through government entitlement programs. They are given the bare necessities of life through these government entitlement programs. Because these programs lack meaningful accountability or an exit strategy for the poor, the individuals caught up in these programs learn to game the system in order to maintain their entitlement benefits.

Many illegal immigrants in America are trapped inside these government entitlement programs, and poverty becomes generational – meaning it spans multiple generations, each one forging the habit of dependency on these programs.

#4 Temporary Poverty

The poor in this category are forced into poverty through misfortune or bad luck. Death of a parent, disability of a parent or family member, disease and health issues, loss of a job, an accident, etc.

Most individuals in this category are eventually able to recover from their misfortune or bad luck and pull themselves out of poverty.

#5 Self-Inflicted Poverty

The poor in this category have no one but themselves to blame for their poverty. These individuals have Poor Habits. They are lazy. They do nothing to improve themselves. They take uncalculated risks with their money. They overspend. They do not save. And they are woefully incompetent in managing their money.

Many of the individuals in this category wind up poor in their old age; dependent on their children, family or friends to sustain themselves.

This is the second greatest source of poverty.

So, can poverty be overcome?

The short answer is yes.

However, Dysfunctional and Exploited Poverty are without a doubt the hardest to overcome. Individuals raised in these households are really placed behind the eight ball in life. Overcoming these two types of poverty is possible, but it requires an almost superhuman effort. But, still, it is possible, if the desire to change is strong enough.

In the movie Trading Places, Lewis Winthorpe III, an old money, wealthy commodities broker, with an Ivy League education played by Dan Aykroyd, is forced to swap places with a destitute, homeless conman, played by Eddie Murphy.

This forced adversity drags Winthorpe down into the abyss of poverty and hopelessness, nearly breaking him. He does not break, however. He resurrects himeself because he does not see himself as a destitute, homeless conman. Instead, he sees himself as a successful, wealthy commodities broker.

Everyone, at some point in their lives, faces adversity.

Adversity can break you or it can lift you up. It all depends on your vision of yourself.

For the self-made millionaires in my Rich Habits Study, adversity did not break them. They survived because, despite their failings, they held on to the vision of who they desired to be. This vision forced them to acknowledge their failings and propelled them to take massive action.

In short, their vision forced them to change.

This change was not an easy process. It took time. But everything about their lives was forced to change. Their knowledge, skills, their relationships, and their mindset improved as a result of their desire to change.

What drove them to change was the vision of the ideal person they desired to be.

Adversity cracks everyone’s shell. When your yoke is exposed, the only thing that will save you from self-destruction is your vision of your ideal self.

Define who you want to be today. Anchor yourself in that vision. And believe.

When adversity strikes, that vision will be the yoke which will give birth to your new amazing life.

My father had high blood pressure. I remember how bad it was because it very nearly killed him in his mid-fifties, before he got it under control with the help of  prescription drugs.

About four years ago, at age 53, I went in for my annual physical. My Doctor took my blood pressure and it was high – 140 over 98. The prior year, as in all prior years, it had been 120 over 80. He did another reading and then a third reading at my insistence. No change – 140 over 98. Naturally, he was concerned and recommended that I begin a regimen of statin drugs to combat my high blood pressure.

I demurred and said I would fix this naturally. To allay his fears, I scheduled another physical in six months and told my Doctor that if my blood pressure did not come down by that time I would consider his pharmaceutical remedy.

Over the next six months I did the following:

• Daily Running (Aerobics) – My goal was to run a minimum of 20 minutes every day. After three weeks I was able to increase that to 30 minutes or more a day. Over the weekends, I ran about 80 minutes.
• Lifting Weights (Anaerobics) – I lifted three days a week for about 40 minutes per session.
• Healthy Diet – I stopped eating breakfast and ate mostly vegetables for lunch. I asked my wife to include one or more vegetables with our dinner and add some fish. I had a Poor Habit of drinking between one to three beers a night. I cut back on my drinking.

At my six-month physical, my blood pressure had dropped from 140 over 98 to 118 over 78. Also, my Doctor pointed out that my weight had dropped from 190 pounds, six months ago, to 181 pounds.

“How did you do it?” He asked.

I told him I had turned my bad genes off and my good genes on.

I explained to my Doctor that one of the three businesses I ran required me to do habit research and that this habit research involved a need in understanding how habits affect the body and the brain.

Thanks to my habit research, I knew that I could turn off my father’s bad high blood pressure genes and turn on other good genes which would act like sentinels, keeping those bad genes in check.

The trick to turning off bad genes and turning on good genes is forging certain good health habits:

• Intermittent Fasting – 12 hours or more without eating.
• Reducing Junk Food – Bread, Pasta, Alcohol, Processed Foods, etc.
• Eating Healthy Food – Two-thirds of the food you consume every day should be vegetables, low-sugar fruit (apples, avocados, non-ripe bananas, grapefruit, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries), salads, fish, grass-fed beef, olive oil, pasture-raised chicken and turkey, etc.
• Daily Aerobics – For me this was running 20 minutes a day. But you can substitute fast walking, biking, swimming, etc. The key is to get your heart rate up to the 130-140 range.
• Anaerobic Exercise – For me this was lifting weights. But you can substitute resistance exercises, high intensity impact training, core exercises, etc. . daily aerobics and alternating anaerobicsand daily exercise

Epigenetics is a word that describes how your lifestyle can affect gene expression. Your lifestyle can turn genes on (Methylation) or off (Demethylation).

We are all born with bad genes and good genes. Your lifestyle can turn bad genes on or off. Your lifestyle can also turn good genes on or off.

Forging good health habits keeps the bad genies in your bottle and sets the good genies free.

When you are in an emotional state, the prefrontal cortex, your rational, executive command and control center, shuts down. The amygdala, the emotional control center of the brain, then takes over.

When the amygdala is in control of your decision-making, logic is removed from the decision-making process.

A common example of this is overcommitment.

A boss, supervisor, or client requests a meeting with you. At the meeting they ask you to do something for them. Some new project or initiative. Your plate is full. You know this because your prefrontal cortex informs you of this in real time. However, you also want to please them. That desire to please is an emotion.

Your prefrontal cortex recedes into the background, suppressed by the fired up amygdala, which was turned on the moment your desire to please entered the meeting. You walk out of the meeting with more work.

The next morning you wake up. Your amygdala has quieted down and your prefrontal cortex is back in control. Your first thoughts are “why did I say yes?” You have a family and other responsibilities that will now be impacted by our emotional decision.

You didn’t have an opportunity to discuss the impact of this new commitment with your partner or spouse before you made the decision. Now, after the fact, you must. This new commitment will require your partner or spouse to take on additional responsibilities. Their plate, however, is also full. You fight. You’re both unhappy.

Overcommitment is a Poor Habit. It is always an emotion-based decision. To remove the emotions from your decision-making, you must give your amygdala time to calm down and allow your prefrontal cortex to control the decision-making.

The best time to make a decision is upon waking up in the morning. This is when the amygdala is dormant. Deferred decisions remove the amygdala from the decision-making process and put your prefrontal cortex in control. The decision you make will very likely be the right decision.

“Let me sleep on it.”

There’s a lot of old, sound wisdom in those five words.