Changing the patterns of your day and what you do can help have positive effects on your well-being. Experts suggest that changing your habits is like strengthening a muscle: the more you work to change the bad habits, the stronger you become.
If you feel like your habits could use a little boost, try ditching these weird things (bad habits) you do every day that are actually really bad for you:
- Holding In Your Gas
You’re not the only one who’s held in a fart here or there–it’s commonly accepted as the polite and self-aware thing to do if you’re in a public area, after all–but, as you might already suspect due to the way it feels, it’s not actually great for you. Holding in gas can induce severe bloating and stomach aches. So, let it out! Just try to do it in private, or, at the very least, an area with some moving air.
2. Using Alarm Clocks
If you dread the sound of your alarm going off every morning, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re lazy–rather, it could just be a normal bodily reaction. Basically, alarm clocks mess big time with your circadian rhythm (your internal body clock that tells you when you should feel sleepy and when you should wake up) because they interrupt your own natural patterns of sleep, which leads to feelings of excess fatigue throughout the day. Obviously, it can be hard to get rid of an alarm clock completely, but try to either take breaks from it whenever you can or get an alarm clock that adheres to your circadian rhythm.
3. Washing Your Hands With Antibacterial Soap
It would be easy to assume that antibacterial soap, with its fancy, scientific-sounding name, is automatically better for you than regular soap. But this actually isn’t the case–first of all, you don’t actually want to kill all of the bacteria in and on your body, since some of it is produced naturally and is actually good for you. Plus, not only has antibacterial soap not been proven to be more effective than plain soap, antibacterial soaps can actually create their own antibiotic bacteria, since over-using antibiotics can cause resistance and mutations, and interfere with your body’s secretion of the thyroid hormone.
4. Constantly Checking Your Phone
One of the bad habits practiced all day long by most of us is the automatic viewing of our phone, without any allowing ourselves to sit with our thoughts. A recent study found that checking your phone constantly can make you more distracted and forget things more easily.
5. Biting Your Nails
If the superficial reasons for not biting your nails–ruined manicures, inflamed cuticle, chipped teeth–aren’t enough to make you stop doing it, there are definitely some other, more pressing, reasons to hold off. Since your fingernails have a small amount of space, they’re basically harbors for bacteria (bad bacteria, like E. coli), meaning that chewing them can lead to sicknesses from colds and flus to hepatitis and HPV facial warts.
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