those habits requires a bit more effort than may seem worth it at first, but if we understand the roots of those habits, the process becomes less painstaking.
The Difficulty of Breaking Habits
Change is never easy to adapt to. One way or another, it requires strength of will; the same is true of breaking habits. The hardship of breaking them is evident in the sheer number of people who give up altogether. Bad habits are almost like additions – things that bring us pleasure despite not being healthy choices. In these situations, they’re even more difficult to bring an end to. Removing habits that bring you a sense of comfort puts you in a situation where the world seems daunting.
The Biology of Habits
According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a lot of the struggle in breaking habits can be attributed to the properties of your neurons. The formation of habits alters the way your brain processes information. Changes in neural activity rewire your brain to include these habits.
Extended practice of the habit strengthens the neural changes that occur, making them increasingly permanent. These habits form in the basal ganglia, the part of the brain with some control over both learning and addiction.
Simply overcoming a habit won’t remove the neural connection that has been formed in the brain. Thus, someone can’t completely break a habit.
If a situation ever arises that can be associated with the past habit, the neural connection will the stimulated, and the possibility for the reemergence of the habit surfaces. Cigarette-shaped objects, ashtrays, or any instance of smoke can be all that’s needed to get a “quitter” to pick up smoking again.
Old vs. New
Because continual practice reinforces habits the way it does, new habits are much easier to break than older ones. Old habits are tantamount to part of your lifestyle while newer ones more closely correlate to short-lived fads, in terms of breaking them.
To get a better perspective on the idea, consider a man who makes coffee for himself every morning at 7 o'clock. After adjusting to the routine of doing this for years, the man stays in a hotel for work-related matters. Having no easily accessible kitchen and no way to make coffee for himself, he feels quite strange and disoriented. His morning is incomplete, even if he does manage to get coffee.
One thing that keeps the man from completely losing it is the expectation that he’ll be able to fall back into routine the very next day. If he had to go an entire week without the luxury of his own coffeemaker, he might slowly begin to lose a grip on himself. A victim of OCD, to reach towards an extreme, who compulsively brushes their hair might have a panic attack if there’s no brush nearby.
Adjusting Your Habits
The first step on the road to recovering is recognizing the source of the habit. If you understand how an isolated event became part of your life, you can attack the problem at its roots.
What’s Holding You Back
What Inhibitions May You Need to Take Note of?
Despite the feeling that it’s simpler to accept failure at removing a habit or at stepping out of your comfort zone, you probably still feel a powerful urge inside of you that believes you can do it.
Taking the first step, however, is sometimes so hard that the process as a whole seems more daunting than it really is.
You go back and forth between letting a habit thrive and break it down, but there’s some force that won’t allow you to go through with it. You must discover that source.
Green Light, Red Light
If you’ve ever tried to break a habit, you know that it takes more than desire to overcome it. When habits become as naturally ingrained into your system as knowing how to breathe, desire can’t stop it.
You can hold your breath for a few moments, but you’ll eventually have to grasp for air. The familiarity of habits make them more pleasurable than not performing. Attempting to eliminate them can lead to withdrawal symptoms.
I Don’t Want it Anymore!
Your habit has a deadly stranglehold on you, but without arms and muscles, it’s useless. It is those that power your habit. An amputation of this root will lead on to mother, more apparent strategies at success.
The Root of the Problem
Every habit, regardless of what form it takes, is alive within you for a very specific reason. An experience from your past merited that you act a certain way, and you were never able to stop afterwards.
Probe your mind for instances during which doing the habit was absolutely necessary. Think of embarrassing situations that, expectations others have of you, positive feelings you associate with the habit, or any other emotion that may have been tied to the response.
It doesn’t so much matter whether the trigger for your habit was a positive or negative stimulus because it’s interfering with your functionality nonetheless.
It may take a few rounds of trial and error, but by identifying specific moments when a trait might have been learned, you are coming to better understand yourself and why you do the things you do. It can also help you find the motivation you need to enlist a change in your life.
Change is Your Responsibility
The worst way to target the source of a habit is by attributing the source to parents or siblings. Doing so implies that they are the ones responsible and that they’re the ones who should be accommodating your condition. Doing so also makes you more bitter towards the individual and stops you from peaceably moving forward. Even if others did contribute to the habit, it was ultimately you who chose to react the way you did. Therefore, bringing an end to it is your responsibility.
Adults typically have it easier in this regard because, unlike kids, they are more fully aware of their responsibilities in life. This makes it easier to accept the source of the habit as a personal fault, leading them to improve themselves more efficiently.
Accept Your Fears
Survival is a basic instinct of every living creature. Fear helps us to react in ways that can help to preserve our lives, so it’s not necessarily the bad thing that people see it as. Still, some fears known as phobias are highly irrational and can most likely be done without.
Consider if what’s stopping you from overcoming a bad habit stems from a fear. If so, the only way to move past that fear is to accept it as part of you, and not something imposed on you by someone else. Denial of your fear amplifies your emotional discomfort. When you do come around to accepting the fear as a product of your own character, slowly begin remove yourself from its grasp.
That’s not to say to remove the fear completely; only to recognize and become comfortable with knowing fear is a part of you.
Out With the Bad, In With the Good
You can’t remove the neural connections related to a bad habit, but you can alter the way it functions by “replacing” a bad habit with a better one. You already know what it is you want to change about yourself, so all that’s left is for you to develop a method through which you can take what’s wrong with you and affect it in a positive light. Think about your future’s new, bright path after
