The One Perspective Change That Will Help You Kick Any Bad Habit

“Lighting new cigarettes,
pouring more
drinks.

It has been a beautiful
fight.

Still
is.”
― Charles Bukowski

They say smoking is one of the hardest habits to quit because of how addictive nicotine is. Going without nicotine causes the smoker to crave smoking intensely and powerfully, so they say, creating a situation where only nicotine can bring them relief from their suffering.

Any bad habit works like that, from nicotine to alcohol to shopping to binge-watching Netflix. The longer you go without it, the more you want it, and the sweeter the relief is when you finally get it.

Friends, I understand what it’s like. I’ve drunk too much alcohol in my life and smoked too much pot in my life and played too many video games in my life and bought too many clothes at the mall in my life and accumulated more bad habits than I care to count. But we’ve got it all wrong.

See, when you have an especially grueling workday, spend all day looking forward to the end of the day when you get to kick your feet up and finally enjoy a smoke and watch an episode of your favorite television show, having a smoke or a drink and binge-watching Netflix isn’t taking the edge off. It’s what made you edgy in the first place.

If you had healthier coping mechanisms for stress, your grueling workday wouldn’t have felt so grueling in the first place. You would have taken better care of yourself, so you wouldn’t have entered into this stress spiral that triggered you to indulge in your worst habits. For instance…

1. If you got to sleep at a responsible time and took care of your sleep hygiene, you would have gotten restful sleep and had more energy to deal with the challenges of the day.
2. If you ate healthy foods the day previously and were full of the macro and micronutrients you need to function, you would have found the grueling workday to be less grueling and likely would have enjoyed it more.
3. If you meditated and took care of your mental health, you would have found each individual stressor throughout the day to be not-so-stressful.

Add those things together, and you get a workday that isn’t stressful in the first place.

When you look at it that way, you see that bad habits like using substances to de-stress and engaging in too much TV watching or gaming are not helping you relax from your stressful life but contribute to how stressful your life is in the first place.

That’s not to say you can’t have an occasional cigar, nice beer, or ten-hour-long Civ VI game with your pals. It is to say that if you depend on any of these things to “make it through the week,” that behavior has likely crossed over from being a fun way to relax to being something that is holding you back in life.

I think most of us have a hard time kicking bad habits because we don’t truly see them as bad. We want the cigarette that calms us down and focuses our mind. We want the drink that finally relieves the tension in our shoulders. We know they’re “bad habits” because our doctors tell us so or something, but we don’t see these things as bad when we reflect on our own life.

If we want to kick our bad habits, we must first learn to see bad habits as bad habits.

• Cigarettes don’t calm us or focus our mind; they make us jittery, scatterbrained, and create cravings for more cigarettes. A clear and focused mind is what we would have all the time if it weren’t for cigarettes.
• Alcohol doesn’t help us de-stress or smooth over social situations; it makes us tense and stressed when we don’t have access to alcohol. If we never started drinking alcohol, we would feel relaxed and okay all the time, not just at the end of the workday when we get our adult juice.
• Shopping isn’t a way to take the edge off; it adds an edge to our lives. If we never picked up a shopping habit, we would always feel good about life without needing a weekly “shopping therapy” trip.

If there’s a bad habit in your life that you can’t seem to kick, ask yourself if you really see it as a bad habit. You may not be making an effort to quit your all because you have yet to accept that it really is a bad habit completely.

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