- Do you have a habit that has been haunting you for years?
- Do you suffer from an inner-self conflict because you were unable to quit that habit?
- Do you feel pain each time you repeat making that habit again?
- Have you tried every possible method to quit smoking or over-eating but yet failed?
- Do you think that you can’t resist the bad habit?
How to break your bad habits
Most of us have suffered from a particular habit throughout our lives, whether this habit was lying, letting go of our rights, wasting time, overeating, smoking, internet addiction, or even drug abuse.
We have all done our best to stop it; we have all felt the pain of the emotions that arise from doing what we don’t want to do, but yet, very few of us have succeeded. Do you know why?
Because we have never thought of the following:
If you think that you can break a habit using will-power only, then you are wrong.
Here’s the story of David, an iron-willed guy who decided to quit smoking. The first day passed, the second day passed, and still, he resisted the urge to smoke a cigarette.
He started to feel happy and confident.
Time passed, until one day, he had a car accident. Fortunately, he wasn’t hurt, but the damage to his car cost him $200. On that day, David returned to smoking.
Will-power is not constant.
But why? Wasn’t David iron-willed? Yes, he was, but his will-power was not constant. It changes with time, changes with life circumstances, and changes with the ups and downs in our lives.
When you are happy, your will-power becomes intense, but it decreases and becomes weak when you get disappointed.
When you’re at the top of your achievements, your will-power may be an iron one, but when you hit bottom, your will-power gets down to the minimum level.
So, returning to David, what could he have done? Not that hard to guess. He should have decided to quit smoking on a terrible day.
He should have chosen a day where his will-power was at its bottom instead of choosing one of the best days in his life to start quitting.
If he succeeded in stopping while being at his lowest willpower, any other day would be much easier for him because his will-power will be much healthier.
Bad habits and external dependency
David tried to run away from his problems by smoking, he didn’t want to face his real feelings, and he just ran away.
He ran away to cigarettes because he couldn’t stand it by himself. David had an external dependency. He depended on smoking to lift his mood.
You, too, must know if you have any external dependency preventing you from breaking your habit. Don’t run away; if you want to escape, then go ahead, but escape forward instead of backward.
Bad habits and false beliefs
Unfortunately, the end of the story was much worse. David started to think that he was weak; he couldn’t quit and started to look back at his history with this habit, and he found that he failed to quit smoking more than ten times, so he just gave up trying again. He gave up because he had built a false belief. A belief that is composed of two words: “I can’t.” Who knows, maybe if he had tried just another time, it would have been a successful try.
Even after breakups, the main reason some people fail to recover for years is that they have false beliefs associated with separations, beliefs like “There is only one soul mate out there for me” or “The one concept” hinder recovery entirely and make people suffer.
Whether it’s a bad habit or a breakup, getting over any of them requires getting rid of the false beliefs you have in your mind.
Bad habits and will-power misuse
Another factor is will-power misuse. Will-power should be channeled to the correct destination instead of being wasted somewhere else.
Will-power abuse is like trying to break through a wall instead of opening the door using the knob.
An example of willpower misuse is when you suddenly become very enthusiastic then run to do a particular task until you get bored. To channel your will-power correctly, write down a plan when you are enthusiastic instead of quitting a habit for three days and then returning from where you started.
Bad habits and helplessness
When you were born, you didn’t know how to become helpless, but as you progressed through life and experienced failure after a failure, you learned a new skill, the skill of becoming helpless!!!
The learned helplessness concept was proven by a laboratory experiment made on dogs; it was confirmed that someone could learn how to become helpless towards doing a task or breaking a habit by failing to do the job many times.
The good news is that as soon as you learn how to become helpless by practicing helplessness, you could unlearn this acquired skill by not practicing it. If you felt for a moment that there is no hope in quitting this habit, say, “NO, I won’t fall prey to learned helplessness; I wasn’t born helpless.”
Breaking habits and inner-self conflict
Sometimes you might not be able to break a habit because a part of you wants it. Yes, you may want to stop smoking because of the health risks associated with smoking, but on the other hand, another part of you wants you to smoke to enjoy the cigarette.
In that case, ignoring the need for one of your unwanted needs will result in suppressed emotions and unmet needs, which will, in turn, lead to feeling uncomfortable, and so you will eventually return to the bad habit.
In this case, you need a method to resolve this inner conflict. There is an NLP technique that was specially designed for resolving internal conflicts, which is called Parts Integration Technique.
Bad habits and trying something new
Finally, if you haven’t tried anything addictive yet, then don’t. Never try it. Many people imagine that trying everything provides them with the necessary experience, but they’re just doing that to compensate for their lack of knowledge or self-confidence.
Trying something makes the fear of “Trying” flies away. Usually, we all have some fear of trying something new. This fear acts as a protection mechanism that prevents us from striving for dangerous things, so don’t break through the first defense line not to leave your non-constant will-power to take charge.
Never break your first line of defense(fear of “Trying”). Trying cigarettes will make trying weed much more comfortable, and trying weed will make trying drugs much easier, and so on.
