Customer Reviews

The Habit Change Workbook: How to Break Bad Habits and Form Good Ones

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am the webowner of Mental Health Today.

This excellent workbook will teach you how to deal with behaviors such as nail biting, skin picking, trichotillomania and addiction in regards to shopping, tv, internet, and gambling. Also focuses on changes in sleep habits, health & fitness, and relationship problems. They state the book can assist with obsessive compulsive disorder with further help.

For chemical dependency issues, you are advised to seek professional help first and then use the workbook for overall lifestyle changes.

This workbook could not have come at a better time for me. I've been working out for 6 months and out of the blue it is no longer fun and I'm now beginning to gently slide into my old workaholism pattern. I know that my old gym schedule needs to be changed and at the same time my work load at home has increased dramatically and I feel lost on how to organize my life and get myself motivated to get back to the gym and fight my workaholism.

The workbook comes with just exactly what I need. Help in changing my thoughts and requires me to come up with a plan of action. For me, it has been a lifesaver and the timing could not have been more perfect. I recommend it!

In a manner that is informative yet accessible the authors of this book take the reader through a description of habits, how they're formed, why we seek to change them and how to go about making positive and lifelong changes. In facing my own struggles with procrastination I found the down to earth strategies to be extremely helpful. I would reccommend this book to anyone who seeks to overcome a problem habit.

I don't know if I'm obsessive compulsive or not, but I have a few habits that I engage in that I believe cause me guilt and anxiety and that I cannot quite get a handle on. I first checked this book out at the library and found myself quickly wanting to photocopy most of the pages. So, ultimately, I bought the book.

The book is full of worksheets and record charts - it seems 50/50 in terms of lecture/practical application. If you are into that, fine. At first, that put me off. I didn't want to write that much stuff down. But when I got further into the nuts and bolts of changing the habit, the pages I wanted to copy became greater and greater because the ideas and exercises were so thought-provoking and led me to eye-openers and ideas of how to change my life that I couldn't seem to grasp before.

I don't know if I'll use this system step-by-step, but the good thing about the book is that I believe it still works and is an invaluable tool for self-examination whether you follow it that way or not.

The only reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 is because the beginning was a bit tedious for an impatient self-starter like myself and to warn those who don't want to do any self-examination and just want a lecture to check this out at the library first. Otherwise, I really think that you cannot lose by having this book and I'm glad I'll have it in my library for years to come.

The habit change workbook is wonderful.
It goes
Introduction
Good habits, bad habits
How habits develop
Whats stopping you from changing your habit
Common problem habit
Assessing your habit
Getting ready to change
Taking the first steps
Relaxation
Change the way you think
More about changing thoughts
Developing good habits
Maintaining your gains
Nervous habits, Trichotillomania, Skin Picking,and nail biting
Sleeping habits
Health and fitness habits
Relationship habits
Excessive spendind and shopping
Excessive leisure activities
Problem gambling
Family and group habit change

This book requires a lot of documentation. It encourages you to record your habits throughout the day and check the progress of the habit.It uses a lot of cognitive appraoches to helping with the changes.Some of the habits helps you identify or ponder over why the habit is maintained.

The authors realize that habit changing is hardwork and they give you ample help within this book.I liked this because it teaches you how to change most behaviors. You can apply this information to any behavior whether listed in the book or not and it can be of service.Plenty of real life stories and encoragment is given. This book is not going to work if an effort is not made on the readers part.

This book doesn't just give assignments, it gives clear examples of how people would/could/should complete the assignments. It isn't overly-technical or wordy. It's very to the point. It's written with people in mind who have bad habits. Perhaps the author even had some bad habits and overcame them and is speaking from experience. I'm not sure, but the book seems insightful with realistic solution tasks.

I highly recommend this book for anyone with severe bad habits or mild bad habits and anything in between. This book does not judge you, it helps you get better for yourself and even develop pro-healthy habits in the long run. I like how it strives to make the task of getting rid of bad habits as easy as possible. The easier you make it for yourself to be successful, the more likely it will happen. This book utilizes that concept.

This is a good useful book that probably could be read by a wide variety of people, young and old, educated or uneducated.

This book will be helpful to people with complex lifestyle bad habits such as overeating, gambling, and procrastination. But, for breaking simpler, unconscious, behavioral bad habits, there is an extremely simple method, which is not covered, and for which no book is necessary. These are habits such as biting nails, pulling hair, talking to yourself, picking skin, touching acne, cursing aloud, where it is difficult to quit since you don't think not to do it until after the fact; i.e. there's no moment of deliberate decision before you engage in the behavior.

The method is as follows: First, it is probably necessary to consciously make some kind of effort to stop the habit---e.g. biting your nails. So if you realize you're about to bite them, or have just started biting them, then consciously prevent yourself or stop immediately. But, as everyone knows, the willpower method by itself is usually unsuccessful. The idea is to choose some kind of personal forfeit as "punishment" for the behavior in question. Then, whenever you realize that you have just bitten your nails, you perform the forfeit. (Of course it's necessary to consciously realize you've bitten your nails, after the fact; but one usually does realize this when one is trying to break the habit---the problem is you don't realize it until it's already too late.)

The forfeit can be anything that is (1) something you would typically NOT want to do at random times on a moment's notice; (2) not so onerous that you might actually refuse to do it from sheer laziness; (3) not, in itself, potentially habit-forming; (4) can be done anywhere, at any time. Examples of forfeits I have tried or considered are: (a) going to a dictionary, finding a word that is new to you, and learning its meaning; (b) multiplying two two-digit numbers together in your head; (c) choosing a random date and calculating its day of the week in your head (using Conway's Doomsday algorithm); (d) making yourself listen to a particular song you hate, in its entirety; (e) doing ten pushups. Although I haven't tried it, (a) is nice since it has the side-effect of improving yourself in some way while breaking the habit; but it requires that you always keep a dictionary handy.

The single most important thing in applying this method is not to cheat and not to delay. That is, every time you bite your nails---even if you just started to---immediately perform the forfeit (or at least do so within a minute or so). Do not delay, or "pretend to yourself that you did the forfeit", or save up multiple forfeits and do them all at once, later, when it's more convenient.

You will quickly find that the sneaky brain becomes aware of the fact that every time it unconsciously decides you should bite your nails, your conscious mind will come in and make it do some work it doesn't particularly want to. This makes you become aware of the habit before you actually do it, and gives you time to choose not to. After some time, you will stop wanting to at all and the habit is broken. (This method also works for instilling positive habits, e.g. brushing your teeth within ten minutes of dinner---just do the forfeit when you realize it has been more than ten minutes and you haven't yet brushed your teeth.)

This cure does not, of course, address any root causes of the habit.

Hope this helps and makes buying a book unnecessary for some people. Others, who want to change more complex behaviors may find The Habit Change Workbook a valuable resource. Good luck!

I have not started to use this book yet but it really looks like a program that works if you work it- to paraphrase a 12-step mantra. I will have to form the habit of daily review of habits and I haven't broken through that barrier yet, but I further reading in the book should help with that. The program suggestions are very concrete and engaging. What is sometimes hard for me is remembering I don't have to understand all my motivations and dark corners to begin to change things. But I've come to see that is true.

I haven't read this book yet. Looks like what I expected it to be.

So far sense i have been using the book it has been somewhat helpfull.But i still yet have got to put the techniques to full use.So i think there is still more i can get from it.