Do you have bad habits and can’t seem to shake them? Have you tried several times but keep falling back on it?
This was me for years, my worse addiction was vaping and despite my best efforts I would fall right back into it. I would stop for a couple of days and then something external like stress or the environment would trigger it and I am straight back into it. I had all sorts of tricks like leaving the vapes in the car - this would make me take several walks to the car just to take a few puffs. Obviously none of it worked.
Today I want to discuss how you can officially shake any addiction for good - and its very counter intuitive so what you have previously heard.
The answer Is you need to increase self awareness
You might now be thinking “I am self aware of my bad habits”, Actually no, you are not. You are doing it subconsciously in response to a craving, emotion, thought, environment etc whatever it is that triggers you to carry out that habit.
Before we dive into your answer I want you to acknowledge that you are a machine. At a young age, you were given keys to this machine called "consciousness". You were never provided a manual to learn this. Everything you know today is by winging it at life and doing the best you can to understand this machine with some guidance from family, friends and society. You believe that you have full control over this machine, no, this machine is asleep most of the time, and this machine has control over you.
Like all machines, it has an operating system. Like all systems there is a hierarchy of operating principals and values that it lives by. The highest principal that all of us live by, is survival. Therefore everything you do in life, at the very highest level, has a self agenda, and that is to make sure your survival is in check and that you are comfortable.
Bad habits stem from when you have a response to an emotion, craving, environment, stress, thought etc whatever it is, your machine response to this with your highest principal and wants to make sure you are comfortable, so subconsciously you will respond to this from a state of semi consciousness and chase that fix what will reward that response.
This is the seed to all bad habits and addictions and the answer is not “Self Discipline” OR “Replace is with a good habit” because as mentioned you are already operating from your highest principle and that will overwrite everything. You might be able to fight it for a short period but internal conflict will overcome it. This why junkies need to be tied up during withdrawals or they will literally try anything - it is tapping into their survival mode where they will steal and literally do anything in that state. That next “fix” is to serve their self agenda and survival. This is the same for all bad habits but we are getting a fix from somewhere else and at a much lower scale.
How do we overcome this bad habit:
Self awareness
Wanting to quit this bad habit
It is this combination that has allowed me to quit all my bad habits. Next time you get the craving for your bad habit, I want you to go ahead and do it, however this time be really self aware about the bad habit you are performing.
Do it slowly and observe yourself doing it, really notice how you feel and notice that internal conflict deep down inside making you feel bad about what you are doing. This is a way of programming your system so you are aware that this is not something good for you. Your consciousness will start to make more connections and understand that this is actually not what you really want for survival. At this point, unless you don't actually want to quit this bad habit, you would stop it. Your mind will automatically come up with new insights to stop this habit.
The next time the bad habit appears you will repeat this self awareness, and observe yourself. Repeating this will not take your conscious mind long to come to realisation that this is a bad program in the machine and its time to actually quit this for good.
Congratulations! You are now one step closer to operating this machine we call consciousness. You’re self awareness has officially levelled up.