I believe we can systematically improve our lives, one relationship at a time. How we relate to the things around us, tangible or intangible, determines our quality of life.
We have a relationship with money, with food, with work, our future and our past. We have relationships with our loved ones, people we dislike, and people we admire. When I work with clients we always start with your relationship to yourself, because it’s foundational to everything else. How we treat ourselves when we’re less than perfect impacts whether or not we grow or stay in a cycle of defeat.
I will dare say that every one of us has a relationship with our “bad” habits.
We all do things we wish we didn’t do. We all have those areas where we seem to act in a way that doesn’t reflect the person we want to be in the world. Perhaps you’re someone who has a healthy relationship with your bad habits, in that, you recognize them as habitual and don’t sweat too much about them. But the majority of people I work with, are in constant conflict with their habits. We dislike them very much, and we dislike ourselves even more for not being able to master them.
There are plenty of effective resources to help with habit change. They’re all helpful. But I found myself in a whack-a-mole pattern with my bad habits (I’d master one, only to have another pop up in its place), and so I needed to dig a little deeper to effect lasting change. My habits didn’t need to change, I needed to change. Changing who we are being, rather than what we are doing, requires far less struggle. I like things to be as easy as possible. If there’s a better, less painful way to drop bad habits, I was all in.
Everything we do serves us in some way. Even the things we hate serve some purpose in our life, otherwise we wouldn’t do them. When I was a smoker, I believed cigarettes helped me deal with the difficulties of life. I felt incredible cognitive dissonance. I knew I was killing myself slowly, but that habit felt like the best friend I could always count on. I loved smoking. But I hated myself for it. I was in a continuous loop of behavior→ judgement → guilt → stress → behavior.
By judging my behavior and shaming myself for it, I kept recreating the negative emotions and stress that I needed the behavior to escape from.
I couldn’t break the habit until I stopped judging it and instead, got curious about it.
I changed my relationship towards my habit. Instead of using the habit as evidence that I was a terrible human with no will-power, I used the habit as a clue to discover what smoking was giving me that I believed I needed.
When I work with clients on any unwanted behavior, the first thing we do is move from judgement to curiosity. It immediately creates some distance between us and the behavior and it inevitably leads to self-compassion, which is the key to creating lasting change.
We do things because our brains believe that this thing is helping us in some way.
We are not our worst enemies. Our brain is on constant call to balance out our hormones, ease our suffering, protect us from harm, or get our needs met. When an action has served any of these things, our brain reads that as useful. And then we’re hooked.
The best way to free yourself from bad habits in a way that doesn’t require a ton of effort and torturous self-denial, is to relate to your habits as information rather than character flaws. Let them inform you on what you truly need, and then find a more loving way to give that to yourself. You always choose better when you have a better option.
If you have questions you would like answered in this article, or would like to inquire about coaching please submit to rebecca@rebeccastarkcoaching.com. Rebecca Stark Thornberry is a Mastery Certified Life Coach and the owner of Rebecca Stark Coaching. You can contact her at 720-412-6148 or visit rebeccastarkcoaching.com.
