Episode 34 : Part 2 - Bad habits - Fighting and overcoming them

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

Episode 34 : Part 2 - 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/fulfillment-any-age/201108/5-steps-breaking-bad-habits https://www.developgoodhabits.com/break-bad-habit/

- Change the larger pattern: Here we are widening the context that surrounds the habit-pattern. By looking at and changing the larger pattern you are actually not only making it easier to tackle the core habit, but are practicing putting your willpower in place on smaller, easier pattern-breaking behaviors. This can add to your sense of empowerment.

- Use prompts: These are reminders to help you break the pattern by creating positive triggers and alerts to keep you on track: Putting your running shoes at the side of your bed so you see them first thing in the morning, or putting an alert on your phone to leave for the gym, or check-in with yourself and gauge your stress level on the way home before it gets too high and out of your control.

- Get support: Get a running buddy, or a party buddy, or someone you can call, or an online forum you can tap into when you those cravings start to kick in and you are struggling.

"My bad habits aren't my title. My strengths and my talent are my title." -Layne Staley

- Support & reward yourself: At some point in your efforts to break a habit you reach a day or point where you go: Why am I bothering to struggle with this? You are feeling discouraged, you feel you are emotionally making your life seemingly harder, and there is little payoff.

- Be persistent and patient: That’s the name of the game, of course: realizing that it will take time for the new brain connects to kick in, for the old brain-firings to calm down, for new patterns to replace the old. Don’t beat yourself up for slip-ups or use them as rationales for quitting. Take it one day at the time.

- Consider getting professional help: If you’ve done the best you can and you are still struggling, consider seeking professional support. This may be a doctor who can prescribe meds for the underlying anxiety and depression, a therapist who cannot only help you unravel the source and driver for your habits, but also create some steady support and accountability.

"Most people don't have that willingness to break bad habits. They have a lot of excuses and they talk like victims." - Carlos Santana

- A Simple Way to Break a Bad Habit: Studies show that even when we’re really trying to pay attention to something like maybe this talk—at some point, about half of us will drift off into a daydream or have this urge to check our Twitter feed. What’s going on here? It turns out that we’re fighting one of the most evolutionarily conserved learning processes currently known in science, one that’s conserved back to the most basic nervous systems known to man.

- The Habit-Forming Brain: This reward based learning process is called positive and negative reinforcement and basically goes like this: We see some food that looks good, our brain says, “Calories! Survival!” We eat the food: We taste it, it tastes good. Especially with sugar, our bodies send the signal to our brain that says: “Remember what you’re eating and where you found it.” We lay down this context-dependent memory and learn to repeat the process next time: see food, eat food, feel good. Repeat.

- Trigger, behavior, reward. Simple right? Well after a while our creative brains say, “You know what? You can use this for more than just remembering where food is. Next time you feel bad, why don’t you try eating something good so you’ll feel better?” Each time we do this, we learn to repeat the process and it becomes a habit.

"The habits that too years to build, do not take a day to change." -Susan Powter

- Curiosity Killed the Cravings: What if instead of fighting our brains or trying to force ourselves to pay attention, we instead tapped into this natural reward based learning process—but added a twist. What if instead we just got really curious about what was happening in our momentary experience.

"Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones." -Benjamin Franklin