Table of Contents
Our habits and self-concept are strategies that once made us successful (met our needs). If you try to break a bad habit without understanding how it serves you, you will be in constant battle against yourself. Instead, meet the need in more kindly and directly through habits that align with your dream lifestyle – you will no longer need the undesired habit.
The coursebook I’m reading for my uni studies (social psychology textbook) has taught me how terribly vulnerable we are to the people around us. Because we usually craft our sense of self according to the response we get from other people (Myers et al, 2010, p 54 – link below).We are a product of the responses and methods we have used over the years to become socialised. Certain traits gained rewards, others didn’t. Certain words pleased and drew us closer to other people – others were considered averse and drew us further away from others.
An organism does what made the organism successful.
How we interact with our parents, and how they respond to us, is how we create our sense of self. Our self-concept is essentially how we have been taught to act so that the world responds to us. If we cry, mom/dad feeds us. If we laugh, the people around us are delighted and give us attention. If we hit or become bothersome, people get annoyed and pull away, etc.
This becomes a problem when we’re trying to change our habits. Why?
Because if everything that we do is a product of what made us successful – then that means that our “bad habits” are also things that serves us in some capacity. In some way, shape or form – they work.
This means that in working to change a habit, you are moving against your conditioning – and you might also start to threaten the need that this habit fulfilled for you. You are moving against your self concept.
This is why you must work through resistance first before you do anything else. Because if you don’t understand the why, the alternative, and do the change gradually – you will end up becoming erratic in your behaviour and it will create this push-pull effect in achieving your goals…
- Swinging between pursuing someone (desire for connection) only to run away the moment they show interest in you (desire for freedom).
- Swinging between rigorous dieting (desiring to feel more desirable) and then binge eating (substituting food-fullness for the desire of touch, emotional comfort and love).
- Getting off the phone to be more mindful (desiring peace) but then returning to your phone at night (because social media is a substitute for feeling connected to others, and also to feel mentally stimulated because the rest of your life is mostly automated and does not pose a mental challenge).
Unless you address the why behind the habit that you are trying to change – you will experience habit-changes as a constant, erratic swinging-effect.
1. Examine The Habit’s Context
Know that your habit does serve you, or did serve you at some point. At some point in time, it made sense to your social context. If you have a habit of people pleasing, for example, then know that at some point in time you developed this habit because it was compatible with your environment.
If you had a period in life where you experienced a lot of stress, without any way to manage or escape that stress – then it’s logical that you’d pick up the habit of skin-picking or other self-monitoring habits to get the need for personal control and stress relief met.
If you experienced a period of social, emotional and/or touch deprivation – then binge eating as a substitute for feeling fullness and touch and emotional comfort is entirely logical.
You developed the habit for a reason.
2. Understand How It Serves You
The next step is to figure out how the habit serves you.
Us humans have a tendency to moralize everything. And in this context, moralizing your habits as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ will not be helpful, so scratch it right now. Your job is not to judge your habits as good or bad – just observe:
- What physical need does this habit help me meet?
- What emotional need does this habit help me meet?
- Examine the emotional journey when you are performing this habit. What does it really feel like when it’s an urge (craving? Anxiety/tension? Desperation?), while you are doing it, right after you do it – and also in the aftermath?
- What social need does this habit help me meet?
- What could this habit be a coping mechanism for?
- What past/present context made this habit logical and necessary?
Read more about how to work through internal conflicts like this here.
3. Examine Alternate Ways To Meet Your Needs
Once you have examined the core motivators behind why this habit serves you, it’s time to come up with alternate, gentler and more honest ways to meet this need.
For example, if you have a habit of skin-picking, and you do this because in the past you were in a situation that was highly stressful, and you didn’t know how to cope and couldn’t escape it – then start to find alternate ways to feel a sense of control over your stressors, find ways to remove yourself from stressful situations, and find ways to relieve tension without skin-picking.
So whenever you feel the urge to pick at your skin, take a deep breath, remind yourself of what you actually need – then meet the need directly instead of returning to skin-picking.
You’ll notice that this is not only more effective, but a much kinder and self loving way to change a habit.
Because just consider what the ordinary self-help advice would tell you: They would tell you to just not think about it (which is kind of like me telling you not to think about a pink elephant. No, stop thinking about it. Don’t think about the pink elephant-) which is impossible. Or to simply ‘quit’ the habit.
But in doing so, you’re depriving your brain of a survival mechanism. Something that actually does work for you.
DO NOT ignore your body’s signals! Instead – learn to meet your needs in more direct and kind ways that actually contribute to the kind of life that you want.
4. Be Gentle With Yourself
Our brain is wired to return to places that’s made it successful the most. The thoughts and habits it’s picked up create pathways, trails – that become deeper and more distinkt the more times you use them.
Imagine this like roads.
If you’ve thought something repeatedly over your lifetime – the road of that thoughtpatterns becomes more and more distinkt, more and more clear. Almost like a buzy highroad between two cities.
If you stop thinking about a thought, it might look like a small, overgrown countryroad. And it will take a couple of journeys to make it distinkt once more – or even for the first time.
It’s ok if it takes a while for you to change a habit. It’s ok for you to fall off or have off-days. It dosen’t mean that you’re failing, it just means that your brain took the easy highway instead of trudging through the forest, trying to create a new road.
Your brain is literally wired to return to old thought patterns that made it successful – I can’t stress this enough.
So when (because it’s certain that you’ll fall off at some point if you’re starting something entirely new):
- Take a breath and recenter
- Reexamine your needs and how the habit serves you
- Meet the underlying need directly (instead of overtly through the habit)
- Remember that changing a habit takes time, and that trying is enough
- Return to your new habits and ensure that your needs remain met through the new habits, just return and know that falling off isn’t the end of the world.
- You got this.
Would You Like More?
If this content was helpful for you, then feel free to check out:
The Email List:
- Be able to suggest future topics and questions for blogpost
- Be able to get advice or help privately through mail with me
- Get notified once a week when there’s a new post
- 3 Journal prompts related to that week’s post
- More personal tidbits and thoughts that weren’t enough for a full post, or the seeds of thoughts that will become content later
- Where the content here is transferred into youtube videos, for the people who enjoy listening/watching rather than reading
- And subliminals with affirmations that support the advice I give, right now I’m set on the Chakra system because there are so many psychological theories that I can fit into the affs of the centers, and it’s so misunderstood in so many places
Pinterest:
- This one is more erratically updated. But the content involves some journal prompts, some notifications as to when a post is made etc.
Literature Referenced in this Post:
Social Psychology – David Myers et al (2021)
Leave a Reply