Episode 34 : Part 1 - Bad habits - Fighting and overcoming them

Letters to my kids: A suicide survivor's lessons and advice for life

Episode 34 : Part 1 - Bad habits - Fighting and overcoming them

Music: “Just A Blip” by Andy G. Cohen From the Free Music Archive Released under a Creative Commons Attribution International License

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/fixing-families/201712/how-break-bad-habits

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201108/5-steps-breaking-bad-habits

- It's easy to think of habits falling into black and white categories -- exercising good, biting your nails bad. But habits also sit on a continuum in our ability to exercise control over them: Some are mild, like taking off your shoes and dumping in the middle of the living every night. Habits become hard to break to because they are deeply wired by constant repetition into our brains.

- But habits are also patterns of behavior and it is the breaking of patterns that are the key to breaking the habits themselves. Usually there is a clear trigger to starts the pattern. Sometimes the triggers are emotional — the wanting a drink or cigarette or nail-biting driven by stress. Other times the trigger is more simply situational and environmental.

"All bad habits start slowly and gradually and before you know you have the habit, the habit has you." -Zig Ziglar

- But these patterns are also usually wrapped in larger ones: This is where are routines come to run our lives. Overall these auto-pilot habit / routine behaviors are evolutionary-wise and practically a good thing; They keep us from having to re-invent the wheel of our daily lives by making an infinite numbers of decisions all day long, which in turn, provide us with more brain-space to think about more important and creative things. The downside of these routinized patterns comes when those patterns land more in the bad-column than the good.

"I have the same friends and the same bad habits." -Nate Silver

- As a quick recap, our habits are driven by a 3-part loop in sequence:

Trigger (the stimulus that starts the habit) Routine (the doing of the habit and behaviour itself) Reward (the benefit associated with the behaviour) The reason why it can be so hard to break a bad habit, is because there are parts of your brain that associate your cravings with the bad habits. [1]

- So if you have habits you want to break, here are some steps to get you started:

Define the concrete behavior you want to change or develop

"Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken." - Warren Buffett

Identify the triggers

Deal with the triggers

Develop a substitute plan

- The key here is mapping this out before that triggers have a chance to kick in.

"The secret of change is to focus all your energy NOT on fighting the old but on BUILDING the new." – Socrates