Letting Go of Bad Habits
by
D.
Patrick Miller
Published by Fearless Books at Smashwords
© 2010 by D. Patrick Miller
Smashwords Edition
All Rights Reserved
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It could be smoking, junk food, mindless TV watching, or something so personal you wouldn’t tell anyone about it. Whatever it is, you know this habit is not good for you. It hurts your health, adds weight, or wastes valuable time — and it almost always makes you angry with yourself.
But with the next breath you may tell yourself that your habit is not all that serious and that you could leave it behind at any time. Yet every time you’ve tried to quit — perhaps hundreds of times — you’re back at it the next day or the next week. In between attempts to quit, you conclude that you just don’t have the willpower to change. You’ve heard that other people manage to find the will and the way, but not you. This makes you feel so discouraged that you decide you need another cigarette, another candy bar, or simply a time-out from worrying about your bad habits.
Is there a way other than sheer willpower to free yourself of bad habits? The answer, according to a wide range of experts, is an assured yes. In fact, these experts mostly agree that the old idea of “willpower” may often be part of the problem. In its place, they offer an interesting mix of ideas for changing habitual patterns. Among the following nine approaches, you may find a new and creative way of taming your bad habits once and for all.
1.
Forget willpower. Pay attention to the experience
of your habits.
“It’s not that some people have willpower and some don’t,” says psychiatrist and acupuncturist Dr. James Gordon, a former chairman of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy. “It’s that some people are ready to change and others are not.” Gordon, who is currently director of the Center for Mind/Body Medicine in Washington, has worked with many people who are drug-addicted and HIV-positive. He says that the issue of readiness for change in breaking a bad habit is the same whether one is hooked on heroin or cupcakes. “Most people don’t stop doing something negative and habitual until the noxious effects of it become so overwhelming that it seems absolutely necessary to change. A teenager who wants to get rid of acne will change her diet. A drug addict who wants to live will stop using drugs and will start meditating or exercising. It has to take on the importance of life and death for the individual.”
But what if you aren’t quite that desperate to change a bad habit?
“Then why worry about it?” asks Gordon. “Either stop doing it, or go ahead and do it — but do it with as much awareness as possible. I would tell people who think they can’t quit their habit to eat that junk food or smoke that cigarette with heightened awareness. Then there’s at least a chance they’ll see that the first few spoonfuls of ice cream are fun — but they don’t need six bowls of it. Once you start becoming more aware of your habitual nature, the closer you are to being ready to make a choice about it.”