Building Better Habits and Reducing Addictive Behaviors

“It does not matter how slowly you go, as long as you do not stop.”

-Confucius

Humans are creatures of habit - or so the saying goes. Habits, of both action and thought, define our lives. But the silver lining is that our bad habits do not have to imprison us - we can harmonize with them through the re-patterning of our neural connections and our minds. Just like the Monkey Brain and Monkey Tamer harmonize through awareness, curiosity, honesty, and respect, the same can happen for our relationship with our habits and addictions. Our unhealthy habits and addictions are the result of our experiences, our history, interacting with our evolutionarily-determined brains. We should not judge ourselves for having them. They were learned and therefore can be unlearned - through slow, but consistent changes, day by day. To re-pattern our habits, we must rewire our thoughts, feelings, and the essence of who we are. Making a small, even 0.1 percent daily change can radically change our lives. It just takes time, effort, and persistence.

There are 4 rules that create a habit: Cue, Craving, Response, and Reward. Imagine you’re doing homework and feel stressed (Cue), and you want to relieve your stress (Craving), so you go on social media (Response), and feel relaxed, associated social media with relaxation (Reward). Unhealthy habits like these soon become dangerous - so let’s explore how these rules can reduce bad habits and encourage good ones. For Cue, create healthy cues in your environment while hiding unhealthy ones (set running shoes out, put a book next to your bed, hide junk food, surround yourself with motivated people, hang photos of your family, etc). For Craving, realize how good it will feel to do something healthy and to resist something unhealthy. For Response, use your conscious mind to make the healthy choice and put it into action. For reward, pat yourself on the back for a job well done - treat yourself with an emotional boost, knowing that you have done something good for yourself and others.

Our personalities and our inner lives are built up over thousands and thousands of habitual actions and thoughts. They are deeply worn grooves in our mind, into which we tend to slip quickly and easily. In our brain, they are represented by strong pathways of neuronal connection. Undoing them takes time and effort. Be persistent. With time, you can become a different person - you can drop those bad habits and develop better ones - whether they are habits of thought or action. You can re-write those burned in neural pathways. Just know that you are undoing years of habit formation and fixing it won’t happen overnight. But, the rewards are great - so apply the daily practice of positive habit formation and you will develop a better future - for you and others.