One thing I know for certain is that those who are able to manage or even avoid feelings of overwhelm possess a more productive set of habits than those around them. As a result, they are able to conserve time and energy that many others squander.
We all have the desire to get rid of what we consider bad habits. But this takes prolonged effort and focus and people who feel overwhelmed can lose hope about ever doing so. Have you ever tried to extinguish a bad habit? Probably lots of times. Just like me, you start out with determination and the best of intentions. Maybe you tell your family and friends, “If you see me doing this anymore, stop me.” It probably went well at first, but you kept thinking about it. You said to yourself, “I’m not going to do that anymore. I’m not going to do that anymore.”
But after a while, all the signals and stimuli you encounter during the day keep reminding you of how much you enjoyed this habit, how relaxed you felt when you did it, or how you feel left out from the group who is still doing it. This all created a sense of tension, disappointment or loss. Maybe you felt peer pressure and you finally gave in.
Psychologist Charles Duhigg, the author of The Power of Habit, defined this in a four-step cycle. He said that anytime a habit is established, it’s dependent upon cues which create a craving. The craving is satisfied by a response. That response produces a reward. You feel good. You feel satisfied. You feel a part of the group that’s doing it. But here’s the key take-away. Once the neural pathway of a habit is established, it cannot be erased or eliminated.
On the positive side, when a productive habit becomes well established, the cue, response, reward sequence reinforces the habit. If you have developed a regimen of working out, for instance, you feel rewarded every time you finish and you look forward to doing it again. But the opposite is also true. If you surrender to the cues you have developed around a less-than-productive habit, your response will produce a reward that will encourage you to do it again, even though you know it’s not productive.
Since a bad habit cannot be erased or eliminated, it must be overtaken by a stronger habit. But therein lies the problem. If the cues from the bad habit keep appearing because you are surrounded by them in your environment, then it’s difficult to establish an over-riding habit. This means that even when you have a well-established habit that overpowers the bad habit through practice, the cues of the bad habits may continue to invade your environment or your thinking. Consequently, there’s a much better chance that you will return to that bad habit.
This means that you need to be conscious of the environment in which the bad habit was created. Sometimes this is easy, such as simply moving out of that environment. In other cases, it’s almost impossible, simply because you have to live in that environment or work with those people. If you really want to drill down on this, I recommend the book Atomic Habits by James clear. It’s a great in-depth explanation of how this process works.
Bottom line, you can’t totally extinguish a habit, but you can replace it with another. Begin with one and only one habit at a time and understand that you will need to practice the new habit for at least 30 days. By the way, don’t say to yourself, it’s been 14 or 23 or 28 days, because when you do that, all you’re doing is reminding yourself of the bad habit. You have to shift your mindset into completely thinking about the new habit you are establishing. So, what’s the one habit that you can establish today, or the one habit that you can begin to overcome today?