How to overcome bad habits

So how to use these concepts to break habits? First you need to find some of the important values you have in life then find the connection between it and between the bad habits.

For example when a wife discovered that her binge eating habit was about to cause her a breakup she decided to seek professional help in order to quit. Another mother who used to smoke heavily decided to stop when she knew for sure that her baby will have a lower IQ because of her smoking habit.

Some people might tell you that reading about the bad consequences of the habit you are doing might be useful and they are right but what’s more accurate is that you will only care about the consequences that violate your core values.

I want you to take a break from the book right now and to plan for the week ahead that will include at least half an hour each day reading about the consequences of the bad habit you are doing.

After you find the information you need its time to put these consequences under your eyes every time. For example if having a deformed baby was your worst fear then putting a picture of a deformed baby above your desk will do a great job.

The main idea is to make your worst fears available in front of you so that they motivate you to quit. Again notice that only the fears that are related to core values are going to be effective.
So we become motivated to quit when addiction violates one of our important values, but what if our values weakened?

Sam believed in God and knew that pornography was wrong but sometimes he found himself strong enough not to get involved into this habit and sometimes he found himself violating his religious values.

Our values whether they are religious or not can be weakened or strengthened and Sam’s religious values were going into periods of uptimes and downtimes that made him go back and forth between quitting this habit and doing it again.

One of the best solutions Sam can do is to revive his old values and strengthen them once again because it’s the weakness in the values that resulted in letting him do the habit again.

You might find yourself doing a certain habit for years without attempting to quit then suddenly attempt to quit when you understand something new about how the habit violates your values.

That’s why there are people who suddenly decide to quit something after years of doing it. It’s as if those people were waiting for a trigger or a certain piece of information to become motivated to quit. The good news is that we all have fears and we all have things that we don’t want to lose and these things can be the ones that stop us from doing the bad habit.

A person might not care about his health but if he understood that something is interfering with his social life he might drop it immediately while a women might not care about religion but when it comes to her baby she can stop anything just to make him safe.

The reason lots of people fail to break a habit successfully is that they try to convince themselves to quit because they are violating some values that aren’t that important to them. Your goal is to read a lot until you find everything about your habit and how it affects your life. As soon as you will find that your habit is violating one of your important values you will become motivated to quit.

In short you can never quit a habit without having some kind of an important value that your habit is violating. After you search for that value and find it use all of the possible tool to keep that violation in front of your eyes so that you become eager to quit your habit.