How to give up a bad habit
Bad Habits are a curse, anyone with a one would agree with it. It all started with temptation, a challenge or maybe with an attitude of trying it now and getting rid of it later and that anyways never happened. Sometimes you feel successful when for a whole week you stayed out of it but it keeps on coming back to you like that old faithful friend of yours (You never had an actual friend like that, I know). Sometimes you become frustrated. You pity yourself for your inability to give up your temptations. The feeling that the world around you would have been a lot different had you never felt the prey to this addiction. After a continuous struggle of two or such weeks, you managed to stay out of it but now you are feeling exhausted, you don’t want to continue like this. There is something you feel missing from your life. Something you desperately want and then… you do it again. It feels like that first rain in the parched desert. And that is when you realize that you are in a very strong trap.
If you are still reading this article, I am sure you are not just collecting information from a random blog but you are addicted to a habit you want to get rid of. Now stopping this guess and prediction game here, let me write directly about the topic.
Intention is the first thing you need, to get rid of that filthy habit of you and since you are searching for it and reading about it, you already have crossed the first step. Congratulations 👏 you are very near to the victory. It might take weeks, months or even years to achieve a feat but you will do it if you intend to do it. Since you intend to move far far away from the habit you have, you are eligible to read the article further.
Relax!!!. You heard that right. You need to relax. Until now you have tortured yourself enough by keeping yourself away from that thing for weeks or months, it always craved of. Stop doing it immediately. The more intense your struggles are, the more intensely you will fell down to the level you started from.
Set up a date to avoid your habit up to. Normally when we start to avoid our habit, we intend to do it indefinitely and that is the reason why we feel exhausted while staying away from it. Somewhere our mind has this feeling that it will never gonna get that thing/feeling again and it starts to give up. So set up a date, it may be one month, one week, one day or just one hour. Tell yourself that after this interval you are going to practice the habit again like if you are into cigarette smoking, don’t touch the cigarette for the time that you have set for your self. When the time is over smoke up to your heart's content. Smoke like it is your first and last time. If it is your first time that you have set a date for you, you need to practice the habit after the time interval is over even if you don’t feel like practicing it. If you are doing it for like 4th or 5th time then don’t do it, if you don’t feel like doing it.
Practice until you are satisfied. You waited a whole month to get that smoke into your lungs and the month is over now. So it is the party time 😃 . You know you can smoke now because you had promised yourself. You consumed one whole cigarette but it didn’t satisfy your apatite for smoking. You took another one and while smoking it half you feel content but now out of habit, you might want to finish it or even pull out the third one. That is the point you need to stop. In the middle of that 2nd cigarette where you felt content stop there. Remember the temptation is over here and now you are doing it out of your habit. This step may be a little difficult but you need to practice it. Stop where the temptation for the habit is over. Do not let your habit win.
Keep track of the progress you have so far. You extended your time interval from one hour to one month. Now try to extend it even more by keeping the above things in mind. Keep practicing and a day will come when your next time interval that you will set for you will be a lifetime. Cheers!!!!
Thanks a lot
Happy Habit Give up