How To Stop Being Impulsive
We’ve all been there, being too impulsive for our own good and sabotaging things in our life because of it. Maybe you’re an impulsive shopper, when see you see that item you just have to buy it. Or maybe, you’re the impulsive kind that continues to call or text someone, even if they’re not responding back – not letting it go. No matter what kind of impulsive person you are it all starts from the same place, a want to “control” and an inability to let things go. This blog post is going to help you learn to identify your impulsive behavior and control it better for the future.
Identify The Impulse – The first step to being able to stop or better handle the behavior is for you to understand the behavior. Identity the feeling of being impulsive, we all know what that feels like. You usually will feel like you’re jittery or jumpy, your mind might be racing with a million thoughts at once, then when you complete the impulsive behavior you might feel a sense of relief if only for a moment, then afterwards you probably won’t feel so great because you’ll regret the actions that the impulsive behavior led you to do. Once you identify the feelings of this behavior, think about when this happens. What situations are you in when these feeling appear?
Understanding Why You’re Impulsive – Now that you are aware of the situations you are in when it happens, it’s best to understand the why. Why do you feel you need to control that particular situation, and what happens when you do try to control it? Why can’t you let it go? What about it scares you so much to the point that you can’t let go. Have you always had this impulsive behavior, or did it start recently? Once you identify the why this goes a long way to helping you calm the behavior when it happens.
Calming The Impulse – The next time you feel those urges of impulse and you have identified the situations where they exist, there are a few things you can do to help yourself in those times. One, try to avoid the stimulus, when you know the situations where you feel impulsive, by avoiding those situations your ability to handle it better in future will grow. Next, when you are in the situations where you are impulsive the first thing you can do is take 10 deep breaths. Make sure you count the deep breaths you take and try to remain in the moment of each deep breath. The next thing you can do is put a time limit on yourself to not give into the impulsive behavior for at least one hour. Usually during this time you allow yourself a “time out” to think about it and really decide if the impulsive behavior is worth it to you. Doing these steps often will help you grow your will power and control over the impulse, so you can make better life choices in the future.
Preventing Future Impulses – Guided meditation on impulsive behavior is a great way to grow your impulse control muscles. There are many guided meditation videos online, and you can even make up your own affirmations and record them yourself. This way you can listen to them daily in the morning when you rise, and when you go to bed. When you do this, you’ll note that the impulse will lower and you’ll be able to handle the situations where these impulses rise better, and this will lead to better life choices.
The real lesson at the end of the day here is not that you have these impulsive behaviors, everyone has something they do impulsively. The real trick is being able to master these impulses so they no longer have any sort of influence on you in your daily life. When that happens you’ll consciously be making better life choices and that will led you to a better future you.