Bad Habit in Disguise

Listerine commercials told me how nicely this mounthwash cleans my mouth of all nasty bacteria and make my teeth clean. I bought that and started to use Listerine to rinse my mouth every time I had brushed my teeth. Later on I was discussing this habit with my dentist and I found out a surprising fact about this good habit.

According to my dentist, every time I poured Listerine into my mouth I was washing away the protective flour that I was putting to my mouth while brushing my teeth. I use Pepsodent Super Flour and that has a flouride content of 0,32%. That is far more than Listerines 0,22% (this is the highest they sell, some of Listerine products have even lower flouride content). I stopped with that "good" habit immediatelly.

Listerine still has it's use, for example you can use that to rinse your mouth after you've eaten (if you don't brush teeth after you've eaten of cause), but using Listerine or other mouthwashes after brushing your teeth is actually a bad habit. You're not damaging your teeth, but you would be better of not using a mouthwash.

Keep it Up

Forming new habits take some time, exactly how long is very personal. According to a study by European Journal of Social Psychology it can vary between 18 and 244 days for a person to adopt a new habit and make it an automatic part of your daily life. As it varies so much between different people it can be really difficult to know how long should you keep working on a habit to make it stick. I'd also assume that the adaption time is not only dependent on the person, but also on the habit and what is the motivation to acquire the new habit.

How can I know how long does it take for me to adopt new habits? When do I know I have adopted a new habit? That is something that I don't have an answer to, but I hope I'll be able to find the answer while working with this blog.

Getting to Know Yourself

To improve yourself it's crucial that you know yourself. You get much better results if you know what you want to improve and why. One area I've been reading about lately is personality styles and how they impact your communication and co-operation with others. It's fairly important that you don't deliver your message the same way to everyone in your family or at your work. We are all different and not understanding the differences in personality can lead to a unnecessary conflicts.

One way to test what personality style you are is to do a DISC personality test. DISC divides personality to four different areas, Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance. Combinations and weights in these different categories give you a hint of what kind of personality style you have.

I did a free online DISC test at 123 Test and here are the results. Not far away from what I imagined before I took the test. You too can try it out and take a look into your personality. I might reveal some new sides of yourself.

Get More Sleep

It's a well known fact that our brains need rest. Lack of sleep is causing similar symptoms and mistakes in our daily activities as being drunk. I'm often hanging out in the internet very late in the night, either playing World of Tanks or reading interesting (at least most of the time) articles about business, leadership, programming or developing my skills. I wake up to feed the kids and get myself to work at the same time regardless of what time I went to bed. Often I get less than 6 hours of sleep. Well now it's time to put a stop on that bad habit and start getting my sleep.

I Welcome Habits

Welcome to the PowerHabitsHowTo Blog. Idea behind this blog is to get understanding how powerful and good habits are formed, how to acquire them and how to get rid of bad habits. I'll use myself as a guinea big and let all you readers know how it's going while I try to acquire new powerful habits. I also challenge all of you to try start a new habit. At least think about it.