Overcoming bad habits and addictions

“Where the willingness is great, the difficulties cannot be great” — Niccolo Machiavelli

Your habit can either hinder or hasten your journey to destiny fulfilment. Your habit can be your ‘destiny maker’ or ‘destiny breaker.’ Parting ways with our bad habits and replacing them with good ones is, by no means, a simple task. It takes supernatural intervention, commitment, willpower and an unwavering desire to overcome our seemingly natural tendencies to think, feel, speak and act in a certain way.

Learning how to break a bad habit can be so daunting but not impossible. I have the special privilege of helping many youths overcome nagging addictions and bad habits over the years. I have compiled eleven ways to summarily help youths in overcoming bad habits.

Remove The Triggers:
Every addiction has a trigger- something that inspires or awakens the urge. This could be a location, a specific time of day, behaviour patterns of those around you, or just the emotional state you’re in. If you want to deal with any addiction, then you must first remove every sign of what triggers it in your environment. For example, downloaded porn videos, porn sites and porn magazines are triggers for the habits of pornography and masturbation.

Avoid Too Much Isolation:
In Psychology, it is believed that addiction is a disease of isolation. Isolation, most times, can empower bad habits and addictions. The urge to indulge in any bad habit mostly comes in moments of isolation. So, avoid too much isolation. A developing addiction leads to the addict becoming withdrawn, remote and emotionally distant.

Avoid Association And Companies That Empower Your Addiction:
The people you surround yourself with influence your behaviour, so choose friends who have healthy habits. The Bible says in 1 Corinthians 15:33: “Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners.” Relationships can empower or help us overcome our addictions. Avoid moving with people struggling with the addiction or habit you are planning to come out of.

Fill Your Mind And Time With Productive Activities:
Proverbs 16:27 says: “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop; idle lips are his mouthpiece.” The mind of a man cannot remain vacant for a long time unless it is occupied with fruitful ideas. It will turn to bad thoughts. Your mind abhors vacuum, so it must always be occupied by something, or it would find something to occupy itself.

Find Social Support And Seek Help:
Social support is vital to our health as human beings, as it empowers us to feel welcomed, important, loved and part of something greater. Addicts often use substances to artificially replicate feelings of importance, love and happiness. However, the great irony is that addicts only wind up lonelier than they felt before. Attaining real social support is critical to overcoming addictions and bad habits.

Hold Yourself Accountable To Someone:
Breaking habits is hard, but finding support from a friend or partner can be incredibly helpful in keeping you focused on repeating your new habit or to stop you from repeating an old one. I will like to call it the “Accountability partner” or “Habit-Crushing Partner”. Have an open and honest discussion with them on what habit you’re trying to crush and explain how they can help. Accountability alone can make a drastic difference in overcoming any addiction or bad habit. Most times, it is better to choose an accountability partner that has overcome your own present struggle. Never make someone with whom you are struggling from the same bad habit or addiction your accountability partner. I can assure you that sincere accountability will always make a difference.

Set Boundaries:
Setting healthy boundaries help in overcoming bad habits by ensuring that we don’t overshoot our thresholds. Setting boundary is not limitation; it is rather a way of checking and ensuring that we don’t lose control. People fall back into bad habits when they refuse to respect their boundaries. For example, if you want to overcome your addiction to sugar, you must be willing to set boundaries around your diet.

Replace A Habit With A New One:
Stopping the bad doesn’t magically make you start doing the good. You have to be intentional on forming good habits and not just eradicating the bad ones. Nature abhors a vacuum. The only way to eliminate bad habits is to replace them with good ones. Mark Matteson said, “If we don’t consciously form good habits, we will unconsciously form bad ones”. In overcoming bad habits, discipline alone is not enough. You can only replace a habit with another habit. In order to reduce the impact of stopping a habitual behaviour, you can replace it with another habit that has a more positive and healthy impact on your life. Smoking is one of the most common habits people are looking to stop and a great example to use for this approach. There are numerous things you could swap out for when you’re tempted to smoke. Some examples are: chew a piece of gum, eat some fruit, get a drink, go for a walk, or play with something in your hands. It depends on your situation, but for any habit replacement, the key is to distract yourself long enough that the temptation to perform the negative habit passes.

Use Digital Tools And Reminders To Your Advantage:
Digital distractions or just general cell phone use is one of the most well-known habits that many of us are trying to cut down on. In actual sense, we can actually flip this thought-pattern around and see how we can utilize digital tools to track, monitor and overcome our bad habits. Digital tools can be used to help us break a habit, either through reminders to keep us on track or rewards when we’re changing or creating a new positive habit. Keeping track of a newly formed habit in the form of a streak is a great way to keep you focused and motivated. There are plenty of streak apps out there, which let you create a streak, set reminders, and receive mini visual rewards when you hit certain milestones. There are many digital Apps that we can install on our phones to help us through the process of overcoming bad habits.

Celebrate The Small Wins And Successes:
I have often realised that many people fall back into former addictions or habits because they never designed a system to celebrate their ‘little’ successes. Breaking a habit can take time. It can depend on how many times per day or week you repeat the habit you want to break or how ingrained it is into your lifestyle. Whether you can break a habit in 21 days or 21 weeks, you need to celebrate every day where you haven’t repeated the habit. If you can only manage two days before cracking, then celebrate those two days. Don’t expect to break every habit immediately. It takes time. If you only managed two days on the first try, celebrate next time you make it to a week and so on. Before you know it, you’ll look back and laugh at the fact you could only manage two days at the start. Keep a journal to track your progress in your journey to overcoming the addictions and also attach a reward to every progress. Record and Reward Your Progress.

Seek Spiritual Intervention:
I have come to understand the place of spiritual intervention in overcoming addictions. Overcoming addiction is not just only psychological; it is a spiritual battle. Seek the help of a spiritual mentor whom you trust and can be opened to. It will make a big difference.

Everyone is different. So, try different approaches when it comes to breaking habits. If you fail, look at the reason, adapt, and try again, and don’t forget to celebrate what you have done well. To break a bad habit in 21 days, you need to replace something you do many times a day, and this can be a difficult but worthwhile process. By staying mindful of what does and doesn’t work for you, you can begin to create the lifestyle you have always wanted. Experts say it takes about 21 days for a new activity to become a habit and six months for it to become part of your personality. So, every day you keep going on in your resolve to stop a habit and refusing to give up brings you a day closer to freedom.

Joyce Meyer said: “You can suffer the pain of change or suffer remaining the way you are.” There is no difficult habit, we only have unwilling minds. It is psychologically true that what you can endure, you cannot change. Change that habit or one day, it will ultimately seal your fate.