Self Improvement Articles

The Impact of Bad Habits on Your Family

Your bad habits can adversely affect you and your entire family. This is especially true when you have kids. Kids learn most of their bad habits from their parents. If you’re a parent or you influence kids, you may want to do all you can to eliminate your bad habits by replacing them with good habits.

Poor Methods for Handling Stressful Events

How you respond to stress in your life is usually a habit by the time you’re an adult. If you were not taught good ways of dealing with stress during childhood, you probably repeat whatever you learned from the adults around you. If you know you deal with stress poorly, study good ways to deal with it so you don’t pass it on to your kids.

Spending Money Impulsively

If you observed your father or mother spending money on unneeded purchases on impulse, it’s more than likely you do it too unless you’ve realized it and stopped it. You can cause a lot of financial issues just by spending money without thought.

Bad Ideas about Money

Adding to the above, bad ideas about money in general can be passed on to the kids. If you fear money due to not having enough, or fear not having enough, you may make some very bad choices that will negatively impact you and your family.

Worrying Obsessively

Demonstrating constant worrying about things you cannot change will also rub off on kids. They see their parent, the person they most trust in the world to keep them safe, being worried about everything. It makes them feel unsure and sometimes act out badly. If you want to stop worrying, you may have to get professional help – especially if it also comes with inherited anxiety.

Being a Picky Eater

Some picky eaters have a reason they are the way they are, such as being on the autistic spectrum and having texture issues, but others are only that way due to copying their parents. If you are a picky eater, you can be picky without demonstrating it to the kids. Plus, don’t force your family to do without meals they love due to your problem.

Not Expressing Yourself

You teach people how to treat you and if you never express your thoughts, ideas, and feelings about any situation, no one will know how you feel. Then you may feel as if you’re being mistreated and act out on that too, causing a rift in relationships.

Poor Communication Skills

Part of not expressing yourself may have to do with poor communication skills. Some people get very nervous talking to people (even their family) about any issues they’re having. So, they keep it to themselves. This is not a good idea. Instead, learn to be open and positive with your family.

Inability to Maintain Good Relationships

If you cannot communicate, you’re over-worrying, and you don’t like confrontation, it can be hard to maintain good relationships with your family. Building and maintaining good relationships can be learned by example. When you show your kids that you’re spending time with your best friend alone at lunch once a month, they learn something from that.

Not Saying “I’m Sorry”

You’ve heard people joke about not being able to say they’re sorry, but this is not a good quality for someone to have. If you are one of those people, learn how to do it now. It’s easy. Just state what you did wrong and then say, “I am very sorry.” No, if’s and’s or but’s.

Eating a Poor Diet

Definitely, diet is passed on to kids. Think about how children from all over the world eat interesting food based on what their parents eat. This proves that taste is a matter of what you are used to. If your parents demonstrated and fed you a bad diet, unless you work toward change you’re going to do the same with your kids.

There is no doubt that each of these bad habits negatively impacts your family. What’s worse is that you are at risk of passing these types of bad habits on to your kids. Even spouses can catch bad habits from each other.

Eight Seemingly Harmless Habits That Are Actually Bad for You

Just like there are bad habits that are actually good for you, there are things that people do habitually that they think are good when they’re really not. Maybe it seemed logical but then turned out not to be true once science looked at it.

1. Squeezing Your Pimples – Many people like to squeeze their pimples (or spots as some people call them), but this is not good for you. If you don’t do it right, you could end up with a nasty skin infection. Talk to your doctor about the right way to deal with skin issues, so you don’t hurt yourself more than you think you do.

2. Eating Unnaturally “Low-Fat” Food – Due to all the bad press that fat gets, a lot of people think they’re doing the right thing when they buy low-fat milk, low-fat cheese, low-fat dressing and so forth – but it’s not good for you. The main reason is that they usually replace the fat with sugar to make it palatable. Eating natural fat is much better for you than sugar, plus it satiates you longer.

3. Eating Six Small Meals a Day – This is a common diet idea that people think they need to follow. It’s common in all types of diet plans and is supposed to help control hunger by keeping your blood sugar steady. Sadly, studies are showing that this doesn’t really work because people who eat smaller meals report being hungrier more than those who eat fewer larger meals.

4. Drinking Bottled Water over Tap Water – Most bottled water is infected with plastic residue. If you live in a place with potable tap water, you should use it. You can get an in-home filtering system that will cut down on chemicals like bleach and fluoride.

5. You Drink Juice Every Day – One problem with juice, even if it’s freshly squeezed, is that all the fiber has been removed. When you drink juice without the fiber in it, you are just bombarding your body with a high dose of sugar that your body thinks is just sugar.

6. You Don’t Eat Carbs – Many people see friends giving up carbs and gluten, so they think this is for them. The truth is if you have no medical conditions that are helped with a low-carb or no-gluten diet, you could be harming your health. People without health conditions need carbs – including fruit, veggies, and grains.

7. You Do Juice and Smoothie “Fasts” – Lots of people today like to do “detoxes” to clean their bodies, and often this manifest with smoothies or juices. The bad thing is, most of the time these are high-fruit-based recipes that can really harm your blood sugar and your metabolism.

8. You Work Out for Hours Per Day – Exercise is good for you, but professional athletes know that daily training is not actually good for anything other than ensuring high performance on the day of the contest or event. Normal people should not train daily like that at that level, and should take breaks from working out.

If you already do some of these things, research them further so you’ll see for yourself that these are not really good for you to do regularly after all.