How Habits Become A Problem and Cause Us To Battle With Ourselves
Many of us, if not all of us have one or more habits. Habits can be absolutely anything; from something that you do (an action), say or even think. If you do something often enough for long enough your unconscious will take it on as a repetitive task, leaving your conscious to focus on daily living.
Most of the habits that we have are for our betterment; breathing, controlling our body temperature, blinking, and making our heart beat. If you had to consciously remember to do all of these things every second of every day you would most likely lose your mind, therefore our unconscious takes charge of running these repetitive tasks. All of our habits and behaviours are stored in our unconscious.
However, some habits that we create become a problem to us. Habits like nail biting, over eating, smoking, drinking, getting angry at a specific trigger, the list goes on. All of these actions were created by yourself for your betterment, believe it or not. Every behaviour that we do always has a positive intention behind it. You may think that this is utter nonsense, but think about it. Take smoking. Everyone knows that smoking is dangerous and does us no good what-so-ever, so why would we want to do it? Some people learn to smoke while they are at school, to fit in with their peers. The betterment in that scenario would be to avoid being lonely or to feel like they didn't fit in, and therefore avoiding being bullied. If we take over eating, we look at the trigger that made them begin to over eat. This could be for comfort in times of distress, for control, as a self punishment for past wrongs that have never been rectified. In this example the benefit would be to remove a negative emotion that is more hurtful to them than the consequence of over eating.
A problem arises when someone knows that they have a habit, that they don't really want to have, but whatever they do they cannot stop it. What is happening then is that a divide is occurring inside of that person. Half of them wants to stop the unwanted habit because it makes them unhappy or unhealthy; but the other half of them needs to keep the habit going to maintain the benefit that the habit is fulfilling. For example: There was a man in his mid 30's who weighed a massive 34 stones. As a child he was very fit and healthy. Then he was abused. In his mind as a child, he thought that if he became fat he would then be unattractive and therefore no-one would want to abuse him. That is understandable and a rational thought. He therefore started to pile on the weight until he began to divide over it. He was desperately unhappy because of his size and became a prisoner inside his own home. He wanted to lose weight and began to do so, but he put the weight back on after only a few months. The reason he put the weight back on was because unconsciously he knew that by losing weight he would lose his protection from being abused, and this was a far more painful consequence for him than being fat.
This is a prime example of the clashes that people have when giving up an unwanted habit. When you know what benefit that habit is trying to achieve for you, you can then look at other alternatives. When you find another way of getting the betterment the habit is far easier to break as you will not be losing anything by stopping it. It isn't always down to willpower.
Sometimes it is not so easy to get to the root cause of having a habit. Habits can be created at a very early age and maintained for a lifetime, so remembering what exactly created it in the first place can be difficult. If you have tried and failed to stop a habit then seeking therapy to help you would be advantageous.
For further information on how therapy can help you achieve this please visit http://www.mindsthatmatter.co.uk/.
Most of the habits that we have are for our betterment; breathing, controlling our body temperature, blinking, and making our heart beat. If you had to consciously remember to do all of these things every second of every day you would most likely lose your mind, therefore our unconscious takes charge of running these repetitive tasks. All of our habits and behaviours are stored in our unconscious.
However, some habits that we create become a problem to us. Habits like nail biting, over eating, smoking, drinking, getting angry at a specific trigger, the list goes on. All of these actions were created by yourself for your betterment, believe it or not. Every behaviour that we do always has a positive intention behind it. You may think that this is utter nonsense, but think about it. Take smoking. Everyone knows that smoking is dangerous and does us no good what-so-ever, so why would we want to do it? Some people learn to smoke while they are at school, to fit in with their peers. The betterment in that scenario would be to avoid being lonely or to feel like they didn't fit in, and therefore avoiding being bullied. If we take over eating, we look at the trigger that made them begin to over eat. This could be for comfort in times of distress, for control, as a self punishment for past wrongs that have never been rectified. In this example the benefit would be to remove a negative emotion that is more hurtful to them than the consequence of over eating.
A problem arises when someone knows that they have a habit, that they don't really want to have, but whatever they do they cannot stop it. What is happening then is that a divide is occurring inside of that person. Half of them wants to stop the unwanted habit because it makes them unhappy or unhealthy; but the other half of them needs to keep the habit going to maintain the benefit that the habit is fulfilling. For example: There was a man in his mid 30's who weighed a massive 34 stones. As a child he was very fit and healthy. Then he was abused. In his mind as a child, he thought that if he became fat he would then be unattractive and therefore no-one would want to abuse him. That is understandable and a rational thought. He therefore started to pile on the weight until he began to divide over it. He was desperately unhappy because of his size and became a prisoner inside his own home. He wanted to lose weight and began to do so, but he put the weight back on after only a few months. The reason he put the weight back on was because unconsciously he knew that by losing weight he would lose his protection from being abused, and this was a far more painful consequence for him than being fat.
This is a prime example of the clashes that people have when giving up an unwanted habit. When you know what benefit that habit is trying to achieve for you, you can then look at other alternatives. When you find another way of getting the betterment the habit is far easier to break as you will not be losing anything by stopping it. It isn't always down to willpower.
Sometimes it is not so easy to get to the root cause of having a habit. Habits can be created at a very early age and maintained for a lifetime, so remembering what exactly created it in the first place can be difficult. If you have tried and failed to stop a habit then seeking therapy to help you would be advantageous.
For further information on how therapy can help you achieve this please visit http://www.mindsthatmatter.co.uk/.