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How to influence your own habits (and addictions?)
There was a report in the news recently about how a businessman had decided to maroon himself on an uninhabited Scottish island in an effort to quit smoking. I do hope he is successful.
The only problem is what will happen when he comes back to his normal life? His assumption is that if he goes through the physical withdrawal process by being deprived of any possibility of smoking he should return without any cravings. Things can be more complex than that. To my mind any habit that is difficult to break is an addiction. It may not be an addiction to a drug such as nicotine or alcohol, or even a food addiction such as chocolate or wheat. People can be addicted to behaviours too of which OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Behaviour) is an extreme form. I even think people can be addicted to procrastination i.e. a non-behaviour!
What characterises an addiction are three things - emotions, beliefs and associations. In order to break an addiction it is important to recognise this. Why emotions? That's because negative feelings arise when you try to stop the habit, and it's the feelings that keep the problem in place. Why beliefs? Negative beliefs feature strongly alongside emotions e.g. "life won't be so enjoyable without...", l deserve ...", "I can't relax without...". Why associations? The brain likes to make connections and link behaviours to situations. This is really important in the learning process. Unfortunately links are created and re-enforced to bad habits as well as the good ones.
Given the above how do you effectively go about breaking an engrained habit or addiction?
1. Recognise that you are going to need to change not only the habit/behaviour but feelings, beliefs and associations as well.
2. Ask yourself why do you want to change it? Visualise the future after the habit has been broken and compare that with a visualisation of the future continuing the habit.
3. Make friends with your subconscious, the part of you that drives the habit. This is the part of you that you want to change, so get on good terms with it! You think of it simply as your deeper inner self and spend some time mediating or using self-hypnosis to connect with it.
4. Make a list of the feelings that you think you may have to deal with to break the habit. Similarly make a list of the negative beliefs and associations.
5. Work through your list changing your responses. Techniques which can help you do this include EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques), Hypnosis and NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming).
6. Accept that sometimes it's a question of 'two steps forward and one step back' in that you can encounter setbacks but learn from them and keep going.
7. If necessary, ask for help - it's not a weakness to do so. Accessing expertise from someone who is experienced in these issues who can provide objective advice and support can be invaluable.
Last updated: 10 September 2009