How to Break a Bad Habit Part 4
A lot of people fail to recover from an addiction or establish a new habit because they don’t know what to expect in the first 40 days of their campaign. They believe that you either get it over with in a few days, or you don’t. They would face severe resistances and withdrawal symptoms in the first 10 days or so, and become disheartened, “Arrrg! Don’t tell me this is what I have to go through for the rest of my life!”
Fortunately, the toughest time is just a normal but temporary stage that everyone who commits to develop a stronger self-discipline has to go through.
If you never hold the line long enough for at least 10 days without falling back, you’ll be very confused as to why you fail all the time, while people you look up to often demonstrate a high level of self-control and discipline that puts you to shame.
Always remember, you and they have the same inner mechanism. You aren’t born inferior to those highly effective and disciplined people in terms of willpower. You simply weren’t informed of how to use willpower where it matters.
Willpower has a very low stickability. It won’t follow through for you 24/7. My willpower is no better than yours. It can be very powerful for the first few days, and after that our motivation will fade. Willpower is like a springboard. Once your campaign is launched, you need to rely on the momentum you generated from the beginning to last it through.
Don’t assign too many tasks to willpower at once! Let it do one thing for you at a time. Use it strategically. Hit it where it hurts the most. Willpower will open a beachhead for you, but you will have to fight the rest of the battles with other weapons and strategies from there on.
40 days to getting rid of just one addiction and establishing just one new habit may sound too slow. But if you think about all the failed attempts in the past, when you’d tried to do everything at once, they add up to a lot of wasted time and debris of a broken heart, for which nothing was accomplished. But a new habit in 40 days means 9 new habits per year. Establishing 9 productive habits in a year that replace 9 destructive habits will make a huge, huge difference very quickly.
Expect heavy resistance in the first week
Your inner mechanism has been used to the old stimulations. Don’t expect it not to fight back like a crying baby if you deny it the old goodies. The resistance will disguise itself as depression, hunger, emptiness, or sickness, depending on what you try to abstain from.
It’s like withdrawal symptoms that drug addicts will experience if they stop consuming drugs.
The resistance can be mental, emotional, or physical. When I was playing computer games everyday, it stimulated certain functions of my brain intensively – a sudden deprivation of it would make me feel disoriented, and very bored. My mind would create the images and sounds of the games, which caused me to fidget, and feel desperate. If I couldn’t satisfy the desire, it felt like burning and itching. I felt I couldn’t live without it. It was too painful to stop.
Later I learned that it wasn’t smart to fight against resistance, rather you should replace it with something else and then forget it. See part 3 on the Law of Replacement.
Fortunately, resistance is short-lived. There will be bouts of intense resistance in the first week, but it will subside to almost nil in the next 10 to 20 days. If you don’t have an expectation of how the 40 days are going to unfold, you’ll get confused and give up easily. Knowing that the difficult time is only temporary, and that victory holds tremendous rewards in the future, is the key to endurance.
One main reason for most of my failures to quit bad habits, and start something new was because I wasn’t aware that pain and challenges were only temporary, compared to the residual benefits I would get if I stick to it for just a little while.
When I say it’s a little while, I meant it.
In my high school days, I had organized a basketball tournament. I had bad shooting skills then. What I felt bad about was my move – it had no beauty at all. I decided to rectify it once and for all, before the tournament began. For five days in a row, I made myself shoot 100 “swish” each day, with standard posture and beauty, before going home. The shots wouldn’t count if it wasn’t a streak of 10 “swish”. A shot that touched the rim slightly had to be restarted again.
I became a great shooter ever since. I’d wowed many guys on the basketball court. It felt effortless and unreal every time I made a clean shot during a game. I wondered, why didn’t everyone do it? A one time off commitment had given me a recurring reward for years to come. It only took me a couple of hours per day for 5 days.
I wondered why I didn’t apply what I learned from this experience on a deeper and more expansive level. Oftentimes, a simple way to a major breakthrough just lies under your nose.
Key lesson: Having the resiliency to pick back up where you fell is important, but the determination to endure the first 10 days without surrendering to resistance is paramount.
Expect bad feelings and emptiness after the first week
If you’ve survived the first week, congratulations, the most difficult times have passed. I remembered when I did my first 40 day fast, hunger pangs were gone after the first week.
In fact, not every day of the first week is tough, but you should expect a tough day or two. Sometime day 2 is toughest, sometime day 4, or 5.
After the first week, you will feel a sense of inner calm, being freed from the violent pains and yearning you had endured earlier. What’s left is psychological – you will experience emptiness, and boredom. But again, this stage is going to be temporary.
This is perfectly normal – for you to miss what you used to be doing. It once occupied your attention, time, and energy. It gave you some predicable pleasure and excitement. Now everything is suddenly gone. You will feel uncertain if you’re going to get that void filled again. You will miss the old kick, and the time and energy that were once occupied by the old habit will yearn for new places to fill. With a new surge of time, energy, and awareness, you will feel uncomfortable. Why would you feel this way? Because your old habit numbed you before, but now you can fully feel your unfulfilled capacity. It’s not pleasant to confront the reality. You’ll also feel unproductive – “Wow, now I have so much energy and time, I don’t know where to spend it!”
Another deadly agent that will come to haunt you at this stage is curiosity. It makes you wonder what will happen if you do it just one more time. Just one last cigarette, one last game, one last porn movie, one last peek… Curiosity says, “Maybe it doesn’t hurt to do it one more time!” But once you do it, guilt and regret will make you feel bad and defeated. Don’t let it do that to you. Remember, in part 1 I told you that it’s important for you to learn how to forgive yourself. Don’t see it as all-or-nothing, but see it as a gradual process. But don’t use “one last time” as an excuse, or you will do it one last time every time.
At this stage, if you succumb to curiosity, the normal response would be, “heck! I already failed once anyway, let just do it a few more times. I’ll stop after that.” If you let this line of thinking deceive you, you will fall back to square one.
It’s easier to fend off the temptation of curiosity than you may think. Distract yourself with other things. Replace it with fun activities such as sports, healthy food, or books – whatever is appropriate in your case. Don’t try to argue against temptation, because it only adds fuel to the fire.
Be aware of the last stumbling block
Towards the end of 40 days, you may still hear your mind say, “ Wow! It’s easier than I thought. Maybe I can do it again for a while, and quit it later since it’s so easy to quit anyway!”
Our biggest enemies aren’t pain, but illusions and lies.
Why 40 days?
It takes the first 5-10 days to overcome initial resistance, the next 5-10 days to bypass bouts of emptiness and boredom, and the remaining 20 days to fortify a new lifestyle without reliance on the old addiction.
Interestingly, at one time Jesus did a fast for 40 days too. When Jesus was fasting in the desert, he used words from the Old Testament bible to resist temptations. (The New Testament came after Jesus)
Relax! Temptations and impulses may look strong, too strong, but they are short-lived and they don’t visit you all the time
You can rely on momentum for most of the 40 days – it’s a breeze. The only difficult times are when temptation hits, but they will die down quickly if you don’t entertain them. Other than that, the path is mostly level and smooth. Knowing this is crucial to endurance. Maybe temptation seems too painful to resist at the time, but if you put it into perspective, it’s only a while, and after that the path will be smooth again.
Don’t be lazy, plan for your weakest moment
There will also be times when you’re especially weak – when you feel lonely, hungry, tired, bored, sad… these are times when you need the most support.
Plan for those times in advance. Write down a plan of defense that tells you specifically what you need under all possible situations: Pre-arrange meetings with mentors, make a screen saver that shows words of encouragement, bring a notebook with you at all times that reminds you of the battle plan in case your mind goes blank when tempted, have an accountability partner, pre-cook your meals, schedule regular sessions for motivational audio or video… When it comes to planning, don’t worry about being too specific, or spending too much time.
I have a stubborn tendency to underestimate the importance of planning. When I am strong, I don’t feel I need it. But when temptation comes, if I can’t come up with an idea to escape or distract myself from it, in 5 seconds I will succumb to it and enter a state of hypnotism very quickly, and then the battle is over!
Cut off enemies’ supplies
Don’t expect a lasting victory if you surround yourself with materials that reinforce your addictions. Stay away from the computer, or install software that informs an accountability partner of what you surf on the Web. Cut off the cable TV. Empty the stash of junk food or porn. Give up on friends who smoke. Do whatever it takes to totally cut off enemies’ reinforcements.
Your resolve is the strongest at the beginning of your campaign, so engineer your environment and cut off all negative influences at the beginning.
Don’t feel bad about it. It’s just give and take. After you have rid yourself of all external attachments, replace them with positive influences according to the Law of Replacement I mentioned before. Do it in one clean sweep! If you allow room for hesitation and reservation, the likelihood to fail the campaign will be dramatically multiplied.
Why can’t God just change me?
In installment two I talked about the spirit. It is the most important part of our inner mechanism. God created our spirit and communicates with us through our spiritual eyes and ears. Our spirit is supposed to be the head of our inner mechanism, not the mind, emotions, or desires of the body.
Wouldn’t it be easy if God just revealed every secret before our physical eyes or changed us instantly so we won’t make mistakes? Why do I take 4 installments of articles to take you to this point?
God created natural laws and limits that we have to abide by – I can’t eat junk food every day, and then expect God to take care of the consequences, and heal me from all my diseases instantly. I can’t live everyday thinking the wrong thoughts, and expect to be the person I aspire to be.
As a reborn Christian, my spirit allows me to listen to God’s voice, discern spiritual truth from the bible, and gradually understand the process of defeating addictions, and bad habits.
Everyday we have many choices to make. Bad choices lead to bad consequences. If we let ourselves live in ignorance and are not seeking truth actively, then we are walking on the path of deterioration, dwindling from the state God wants us to attain.
Let’s say you’re able to understand how to operate your mind, emotion, and body in a way that optimizes your productivity on earth, but what about the afterlife? What if there is more than this? If there is eternality waiting for you, don’t you want to know where you will end up eternally? The answer to that question will change how you live this life and what you live for. If you earn this life, but lose the eternal one, then what’s the point?
Christian or not, you will benefit from the strategies of this series. But by receiving Jesus Christ as your personal savior, you will have a renewed spirit that can communicate with the Spirit of God, who will provide daily reinforcements, guidance, and interventions that adjust your course through a life that is full of challenges, temptations, and obstacles.
Do you want to rely on your own power and intelligence to live a perfect live on earth? Or do you want to rely on God’s infinite power and wisdom through eternality?
The difference is like a candle and the Sun.
Coming Up Next
In the final installment we will discuss the roles of the Bible, and God, in the process of overcoming addictions and bad habits.
