A problem that “doesn’t exist” until it harms your surroundings
One of the biggest problems with bad habits is invisibility. In some cases, this invisibility concerns the environment of a person who has a bad habit.
An example is a society that, due to the fear of losing a friend, the fear of being intrusive or due to indifferent, does not speak frankly about what it sees, namely, about the bad habit in which the friend is drowning.
However, this invisibility is not the most common fact that, over time, the bad habit of a friend or an acquaintance encroaches on the comfort zone of his environment, in fact. Then the environment ceases to be silent.
Accordingly, the more a bad habit is started, the more chances the addict has to hear from those around him that he is moving in the wrong direction.
However, often these remarks are not aimed at improving the lives of the independent person himself but rather at improving the lives of those around him.
Such a position in the environment has an even worse effect on the addict and isolates him from the environment.
Isolation of the addicted
So, the first effect of bad habits in isolation. Obviously, eventually, the addict will find a new society that will approve of his deviant behavior by the fact that their behavior is similar or by the fact that the addict approves of their deviant behavior in another area of life.
This is what is called co-dependency in psychology. Accordingly, the chances of conceiving with the help of the environment become minimal, or rather impossible.
There is an environment that can sacrifice itself and engage in the liberation of the addict. However, now we are talking about the general majority.
So, in most cases, the addict is left alone with his addiction. As unfortunate as it sounds, even when the addict faces loneliness and exclusion from social circles, he will not see a problem in a bad habit.
The problem will remain invisible in the future, and the fault of the exclusion will be anything but a bad habit.
Recognize the problem
The first thing an addict needs to overcome is invisibility. If the environment did not try, no addiction would be overcome if it is not recognized. So the path to healing lies through acknowledging the problem.
To speak more concretely, let’s take the bad smoking habit as an example. If you ask any smoker about how big a problem smoking is, you will hear in response that there are more serious problems in life, or even hear that smoking helps him, relaxes him…
Accordingly, you cannot get rid of a bad habit until the extent of the damage caused by the bad habit is understood.
Get rid of everything that leads to a bad habit
After recognizing and understanding the problem, the next step is to distance yourself from the thing that will drive you back to the bad habit.
In the case of smoking, it can be a refusal to go out for a smoke break with friends with the idea that you will not smoke but just chat, changing daily habits instead of morning coffee with a cigarette or morning exercise.
Fill the time that belonged to a bad habit
It is important to be able to fill the empty space in the daily schedule left by the cigarette.
One of the easiest ways to find a replacement for a cigarette is through Hong Lik’s invention. The history of this invention is rather sad.
After all, the Chinese inventor’s desire to create an electronic cigarette was born after the death of his father, who, dying of lung cancer, could not give up the cigarettes, and so he died.
Despite the sad beginning of this story, Hong Lik managed to create a device that changed the future of many people. It was thanks to his electronic cigarette that millions of people quit smoking cigarettes, saving not only their own health but also the health of their loved ones.
Although today’s successors to e-cigarettes can also be addictive, by going through step 1, which is acknowledging the problem, you can avoid replacing one bad habit with another.
One of the closest equivalents of the electronic cigarette of that time was vape mods (https://vapingdaily.com/best-vape-mods/); thanks to these devices, people quit smoking and did not switch to vaping, as it happens today.
Obviously, nowadays, the best vape mod contain much more convenience to use. Vape mods today don’t leak and have batteries of better quality.
Today there is the best refillable vape mod that eliminates the philosophy of “use and throws away.” You can monitor the essence of the consumed nicotine and progress in reducing its use from your smartphone.
This means that today, thanks to technology, we have many more opportunities to eliminate bad habits than our ancestors.
And if in 2000 thousand millions of people with minimal innovations were able to quit smoking, today it is enough for us to recognize the problem and have the desire to get rid of it because modern technologies allow us to do it better and more efficiently than ever before.
Physiological factors
Obviously, this is not easy because, for our brain, escaping from change means survival. Every time we return to a harmful habit, the body rewards us with dopamine for the absence of these changes, so, at the physiological level, it looks like a closed circle.
Motivation is the key to the solution
However, it can be broken with strong motivation. Very often, the motivation of power makes us change even despite our physiological needs.
Having the motivation to dominate your life and understanding how much power over yourself a bad habit takes away from you, you will be able to succeed in the fight against it.
In the case of smoking, the obvious fact is that smoking takes up your time. To smoke one cigarette, you lose 11 minutes of life if you smoke 20 cigarettes a day, or one pack, you shorten your life expectancy by more than 3 hours every day.
By smoking one pack of cigarettes a day, you choose to live three hours less every day. In addition, smoking 1 cigarette also requires time and space, respectively. It takes an average of 3 minutes per cigarette, minus 1 hour every day when smoking one pack a day.
From the above, it becomes obvious that cigarettes steal your life in the present and the future. Accordingly, the motivation to regain power over life and decide how to allocate time free from cigarettes is not such a bad motivation to quit smoking.
Conclusion
Given the above, we understand that the main factor in our fight against bad habits is our free choice and motivation, our act of will to get rid of the problem that we finally saw and recognized.
If we choose to get rid of this habit, we will definitely succeed, because behind us is the experience of our ancestors, who over the years improved methods of combating bad habits.
