Are You A Slave To Your Bad Habits? (1/3)
Why Breaking Bad Habits Can Be Hard
- Good habits help your life, bad habits harm your life.
- Habits are automatic and pleasurable patterns of behaviour.
- Stopping a habit causes psychological discomfort.
A habit is something you do on a daily, weekly, monthly or even yearly basis that you repeat over and over again in a similar or identical way.
These habits can be physical (the way you behave) and/or mental (the way you think) and can broadly be divided into two distinct categories.
The first are positive, or good habits. These benefit your life, and help you to achieve the things you want to accomplish.
The second are negative, or bad habits. These negatively impact your life and will either prevent, or make it difficult for you, to achieve success in areas of your life that are affected by those habits.
Habits are therefore an extremely important part of your life, as they make you the person you are. Unfortunately however, most people have at some point in their life developed self defeating habits.
The effects of these bad habits are now causing them varying degrees of frustration, anxiety, low self esteem and/or stress.
Breaking bad habits are therefore something virtually everyone can benefit from. As by getting rid of your bad habits, you will not only remove the negative effects they are having on your life, but you will also change the direction your life is going.
In this article series we shall be looking at how you can do this, by stopping your bad habits and replacing them with new and beneficial good habits.
However to begin with, we are first going to look at two important characteristics of habits, the automatic nature of habits and how pleasure and pain play a role in the habits you develop.
Understanding these characteristics will help you when you begin to learn how to change your bad habits in the next article.
Very Important Note About These Articles
This article series has been specifically designed to remove bad habits at the subconscious level, so that you can bring a meaningful and lasting change to your life.
It is absolutely essential that you complete the exercises within these articles, and take your time to fully understand them if you want to break your bad habit.
Although there are three parts to this article series, each part should be read on separate days and not all at once. This will assist the process of strengthening your conscious mind, whilst also making it easier for you to re-programme your habits at the subconscious level.
At the end of this series, on day 4, you can then begin the process of permanently removing your selected bad habit from your life.
The Automatic Nature Of Habits
Whenever you do something over and over again, it eventually becomes automatic to the point where you can do it easily and without giving it much thought.
For example, brushing your teeth is a habit everyone has (I hope!). We each brush our teeth around the same time in the morning, and at night.
As a result, you can literally put some toothpaste on your toothbrush, stick the toothbrush in your mouth and the rest just does itself!
This is one of the major advantages of habits, as they allow you to devote your mind to other tasks while you automatically do the things you are already familiar with. In real world terms, this means you can multi-task.
So for example, while you are brushing your teeth you could be thinking about your day, or while you are driving your car (another habit) you could be talking to someone sitting next to you.
The key point to understand from these examples is that because habits occur largely automatically, we tend to have little control over them.
As a result we can often feel powerless to break a bad habit we may have developed, and so continue to do it over and over again.
In order to successfully stop a bad habit you need to break this unconscious automatic hold it is having on your life, and you do this by activating the conscious thinking part of your brain.
In other words, the first step to overcoming your bad habit is to start thinking about it and why you are doing it.
In the next article we will begin this process of consciously thinking about your habits, and later discuss a technique you can use to override your habit at the subconscious level.
The Pleasure And Pain Of Habits
If someone asked you to give up something you really liked, would you do it? For most people, the answer would be no. The simple truth is that people don’t like to give up things they enjoy, and the same applies to habits.
People like their habits because they are a familiar and comfortable part of their everyday routine. If you were to suddenly break that habit by introducing something unfamiliar to their life, it would case them some degree of mental or physical discomfort because they would now have to adapt to a new way of doing things.
Below is an exercise you can try right now to demonstrate this principle for yourself.
Habit Exercise
If you normally use your computer mouse in your right hand, try breaking your habit right now by switching over to your left hand (or switch to your right hand if you normally use your left hand).
Go and browse the internet for a few minutes, and while you are doing so pay attention to how you feel using the mouse.
Important: Doing this exercise will help you to better understand how to break a habit later on.
Back?
Good!
So how did it feel? For most people using the mouse in their unfamiliar hand feels uncomfortable, and they are not able to move it as well as they normally do. This is entirely natural, and expected.
In this quick exercise you broke your habit of using the mouse with your dominant hand, and as a result you broke the automatic unconscious control your brain had over the movement of that mouse.
Breaking your habit meant you had to start consciously thinking about what you were doing, as moving the mouse accurately now became unfamiliar and more challenging.
What you just experienced is known as psychological discomfort, and it is a key principle to understand if you are to successfully overcome your bad habits.
The “Pain” Of Psychological Discomfort
People have a natural tendency to be attracted towards pleasure, and repelled away from pain.
Note : Pleasure can be anything you enjoy, are comfortable with and find easy to do. Pain can mean anything you do not enjoy, find uncomfortable or difficult.
The habits you currently have are therefore considered to be “pleasurable” by the brain, because they keep you in your “comfort zone”.
Since you are naturally attracted towards pleasure, the unconscious part of your brain causes you to repeat these habits over and over again.
However whenever we try to break a habit (such as in the mouse exercise you have just done) we experience “pain” because we are now doing something that is unfamiliar and challenging.
As a result of this, the unconscious part of your brain causes you to want to return back to your old and familiar pleasurable habit.
The trouble is, this often occurs automatically and without you thinking about it, which is why stopping bad habits can be so difficult.
If you are now using the mouse with your dominant hand again you have just seen a good example this, and how your subconscious mind can automatically control your behaviour without you even being aware of it!
Summary Of Main Points
In the next article we shall begin a preparatory process to activate the conscious thinking part of your brain. This will give you a better chance of overcoming the unconscious control your habits have over you.
However before we move on, it is important for you to understand the main points raised in this article. I have summarised these for you below.
Habits Are Automatic
Habits are largely driven by the unconscious part of your brain. This can cause you to do them automatically, and without giving them much thought.
It also means that once a habit has been firmly established, you have little control over it unless you exert conscious control over your habit.
Habits Are Pleasurable
We become comfortable with our habits because they are pleasurable to us, breaking that habit means experiencing some degree of psychological discomfort.
Since we are attracted towards pleasure we quickly desire to return back to our old habit, often feeling we are “helpless” to resist.
When this occurs, the programmed subconscious habits succeed in overriding the desires of the conscious part of your brain.
That’s it for today, come back tomorrow and read part 2.
