Being a human, you gotta do what humans do. You walk, you eat, you communicate. Human stuff.
You're walking down a street and notice a dog, it's cute. You want to say hi to it, and so you move towards it. It moves towards you. You're both moving towards each other but wait.
why is the dog barking? why does it look angry? what did I do wrong?
The dog comes at you faster giving you lesser time to process. The dog knows batman is invincible with prep time, so it removes the prep time.
You have been bitten by the dog. So next time you're walking to the same destination, you avoid that street with the miserable dog. You don't want to go there anymore. You don't want to be bitten. And that's okay. No one's judging you for your fear of dogs. Maybe. It doesn't matter who's judging you. Your fear is real. It's valid. You are valid. You don't have to go down that street again if you don't want to.
But let's say you have to. For giggles. In a hypothetical situation where there is only one way to go where you need to and that way involves meeting the dog who bit you, what would it take for you to go there?
Probably a weapon? No, you are not doing that anymore, you've left that life behind. You need to go there no matter what though.
You go down that same street and oh look the dog is on a leash this time. I'm safe right?
right?
the dog growls at you and you growl back.
Past trauma usually encourages behaviors that would avoid the trauma or anything related to it. A person with a bad experience with a dog for the first time would avoid dogs in the future. This is, in general, a good approach to life. It's a safe approach. Nothing can hurt you, and when something good happens, you are encouraged to repeat that action again, so more good would happen. It's a nice strategy. It's a simple strategy. Some would call it a Tit for Tat strategy in the context of game theory. It's the best strategy for finite games you could employ.The game you're a part of though is infinite. Here, the tit for tat strategy is alright but there's more to these things when there are multiple turns and multiple players involved. I'd highly recommending checking out this interactive webapp that illustrates the evolution of trust.
Often times, simple strategies or even complex ones can form life-long habits. A positive experience when you're performing the habit combined with a negative one when you aren't performing it makes it even stronger. This has been a good development for us as have been most developments, but as with most developments, if it's not in our control, it could control you instead.
What to do about it, you ask. How can I get rid of all my bad habits? How can I change myself to be a better person?
Well, I don't know. Figure it out yourself!.. Kidding! that's what this article is about. Or is it? Yes it is. But I don't know. These are as always some thoughts of a serial rambler. Be skeptical. I believe intrusive thoughts are similar to habits and what I say about habits can be applied to any kind of intrusive thoughts as well. Though, I understand that the formation of intrusive thoughts and habits may be entirely different, both share their behavious in some ways.
Every habit has a trigger. If your usual commute involves walking by a cigarette shop, you are more likely to buy that cigarette (assuming smoking is the bad habit we're talking about). The trigger here could be just looking at the shop. It could also multiple triggers - the time of the day, the smell near the shop, the people's faces you frequently see there, etc. These triggers trigger the urge in you to perform your habit.
The easiest way to get rid of a habit is to get rid of the trigger first. In the situation I outlined above, you must change your path. Try some other way to go to your destination.
Yes, removing the trigger always requires some change in your routine or lifestyle to some degree. The change could be small for some, for example, flipping a photograph, or big for others, like moving to a different city.
(if the reader has complaints about putting in effort to make change in their life, i'd urge the reader to please grow up already.)
It is however often the case that removing the triggers completely is not possible at all. For instance, moving to a different city may not be a feasible option for removing a habit. Often, ignoring your anguish by deprecating your mental problems helps move forward. In such cases, try to make the triggers less perceptible. If not, you are lured into it, and it's not your fault, don't be so hard on yourself that you aren't able to fight for another day. Especially when the fight hasn't begun yet.
let's say removing the trigger didn't work, or it did, but not enough triggers were removed and you have free time on your hands, and now that you're here, it's easy to do it right. your bad habit is easy to do, so maybe you should do it is what you think. probably for the last time. never again.
once you've fallen in this should i? phase, that's when your fight has begun.
Yes, it takes a lot more effort now. This is where you need to put actual effort. Removing triggers is the easy way, but once you are in the situation where you are about to perform a habit, that's when you need to put in mental effort to stop it. And there's no way around it. Put in effort to change your life.
There are things that you can do beforehand to make it easier to put more effort in the moment. In general, there are two ways:
The first way is what we have used already, i.e. removing the trigger. Removing the trigger makes it less likely for the thoughts of performing the habit to appear. It makes the first step of performing the habit more difficult. Next, what you need to do is list down the steps you do in order to perform your habit (including any preparation), and then think around ways on how you can make each step much more difficult. The point here is to give you more time and multiple points at which you can reconsider, and win.
The second way is to make your story stronger. But before that there's another problem to tackle.
Filled with enthusiasm and hope, you spend the night writing about your intricate plan for world domination, you detail out your strategy, about how you will change your routine, what exactly will you do when you wake up and so on and so on, and then when the time finally comes i.e. when you wake up in the morning, there's nothing left anymore to motivate you to do what you wanted.
You simply forget all the motivation you had the previous night.
That can be quite annoying , it's a real problem. There are different things you can do about it.
One way is to avoid planning at night. Yes, it's simple, just defer your planning itself to the next day. When you feel super motivated, if it's night time, you need to defer it to the day, and just try your best to go to sleep. It is much easier to immediately start executing your plan after you're done planning, and at night we don't usually decide to execute immediately since we don't have the time.
Another thing you can do is practice mindfulness. Practice being aware of yourself and your surroundings. Look at yourself from a third person perspective. Listen to the sounds around you. Be aware of everything that's touching you including air. This will help you calm yourself and eventually you learn to calm your thoughts intentionally.
Practicing mindfulness will help you become more aware of yourself and your surroundings till you can eventually make sure that your actions align with your overall intentions, and when you are performing a bad habit, you will be more aware of what you are doing and the techniques and weapons you have at your disposal will become much more clearer and perhaps easier to use.
And this will also help you make your story stronger.
Every habit is a story in itself. Another story is overcoming a bad habit. How do you make stories stronger? By thinking about them.
Detail out in your mind (and maybe on a paper/document as well if it helps organize your thoughts) how you are planning to overcome your habit. What are the negative ways the habit has affected you? What are the positive things that will happen in your life once you get rid of the habit? Answer these questions to yourself and maybe come up with more questions to make your story stronger. Pro tip: Attach emotion to your answers to boost their efficiency.
The stronger your story the more likely it is to win against another one.
In preparation, you can make the story stronger in your mind, but also you can place things or writings near your triggers as well to remind you of your story and make it stronger in the moment.
So, these are the two ways you have: making the habit difficult and a strong story.
A combination of these should ensure that you're less likely to perform the habit and more likely to stop if you've started it.
After all this, if you still give in, and then you remember again that you wanted to quit, it is common to have thoughts that it is too late now. It's too late to stop or it's too late to change anything.
You think that that's done and there's no going back, but deep down you know it isn't true. Being in war with yourself is far harder than what it sounds and feels much less grandiose than it's made out to be. It sucks and you're going to be sad still. But you can stop. That's where your will power comes in again.
We need mental effort to do things. People watch motivational videos and get inspired and that's such a waste because often people watch motivational videos already with the motivation of getting motivated.
In a situation where you think you've give up and you've lost the war, that's when it matters where you get your motivation from. And that place should be within you. You have to make your mind work for you to get you the thoughts you need to get rid of your bad habit, to make you stop performing the bad habit. Your intrinsic motivations and your inner principles of life may also come into play here. Do your best to build up your motivation and get out of the situation you're in.
You need to interrupt yourself.
In the moment that you are performing your bad habits, it is less likely for you to be motivated to stop it. In such cases, you need to find ways to interrupt yourself. This can be handy in multiple situations where you can stop yourself from doing what you are against.
A system of principles for yourself that shapes your life and helps achieve your goals can definitely help here, but if not, there's another weapon you can forge for yourself and that's creating another habit.
Whenever you're in doubt, you need to create a ritual, say tapping your left hand's index finger on your right hand's palm thrice. It can be anything random. It can be four push ups. It may be saying some words to yourself. Whatever it is, it needs to be something that distracts you from your immediate task if only for a while.
It might take a bit of time to develop, but the important thing is to do it whenever you're in a doubtful situation.
By a doubtful situation I mean a situation where you feel conflicted. This happens when what you feel forced to do isn't what you actually want to do. Once, you start performing your ritual in at least 7-8 different situations where you feel conflicted, you will be more likely to remember it while performing your target bad habit. And in that moment, it would give you an upper hand once you submit to this weaponized habit instead of the habit you're against. Your weapon can be anything, you can go bleh bleh bleh and mock your thoughts as they come. That's a power you'll have. The trigger of this habit will be uneasiness.
The reason this works is you give yourself a distraction and time away from your bad habit to invest in another. Attention is a resource that can't be used by multiple threads at a time. Use that and starve out the bad habit.
well, there's always another day isn't it?
You're still alive. Don't make this your story. Don't let just a habit consume you. You always have another try as long as you're alive. So keep putting in more and more effort into what makes your life worth living instead.
And if it's too hard, and if you're too tired, it's not irrational at all to take extreme measures. When you're at your lowest, you can only go higher. So, never give up. Move to a different city. Be smarter. Work harder. Commit. Make your own story.