How to Break That Habit Today

So you want to break a bad habit, well you’re reading the right article. This brief article willlet you know why you have bad habits as well as how you can break those bad habits. Where Did the Habit Come From? A parent, a friend, a relative, perhaps the media taught you something that you wish you never learned. They taught you how to smoke a cigarette, gamble, eat excessively, et cetera, and they may have even taught you this unaware. So you picked up the habit, it was fun, it was relaxing, the only problem was it was also… “bad;” bad for your health, bad for your relationships, and ultimately bad for your long-term happiness. Why Do You Have the Habit? Well since it’s so “bad,” why don’t you just get rid of it? Of course it’s not that simple (it never is); it’s called a habit for a reason. You have developed a habit that you depend on. As Samuel Johnson so eloquently said, “The chains of habit are generally too small to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.” You now depend on this habit for comfort, happiness, freedom from boredom, and as a stress reliever. Perhaps most importantly, you’ve come to depend on the habit to relieve you from the pain of living. Something in your life is causing you pain, and instead of dealing withthe pain, you’ve opted for drugs. Every time you perform that habit (e.g. eat that extra donut) your brain gets a shot of dopamine and you feel good; like the old saints use to sing, “You feel like going on.” That good feeling numbs out the real pain in your life. The pain caused because you feel unappreciated, unimportant, or unfulfilled. How Do You Break the Habit? Breaking the habit is the easy part. The hard part is figuring out why you have the habit and solving the real issues related to the painthat you feel everyday. It’s very difficult to stop taking Novocain when you’ve just had a tooth extracted from your mouth. Why? Because you don’t want to deal with the pain caused by the extraction, you need the drug to cope with the pain, to assist you in continuing to live your life normally. To break the habit you must find the source of your pain. You must uncover the pain and deal with the pain. This is hard work; this may take a long time, you may need to remove some people from your life, you may need to add some people to your life, you may need to forgive someone; you may need to start living. Whatever the issue, it must be uprooted fromthe very root, and that root is unhappiness; when you deal with the unhappiness, breaking the habit becomes easy. The Easy Part Once you are free from “unhappiness and pain,” it’s just a matter of committing to replace the bad habit with a good one (a good habit that’s related to the bad habit – i.e. replace overeating with jogging). You no longer need this bad habit, so get rid of it, don’t let it hang around just because it’s a “habit;” habits that have no use are relatively easy to break. So use your discipline to “force your hand” initially into breaking the bad habit with a good one. With several months of practice the good habit will take over, and you’ll beginto forget that you ever struggled with the old. Thank you for reading! Please tweet or share this article.