Habits & Addictions

At some point in your life, you’ve become aware of a bad habit and have made the effort to change it. Some are easier to break than others. Regardless, breaking habits is no easy feat. The longer a habit has been with you, the harder it will be to break. Too often when habits are changed, you’ll find yourself slipping and falling right back into the old pattern over time. Habits are developed so that we can increase efficiency in life. This means daily behaviors become a subconscious process. When we don’t have to consciously think about how to do the same action repeatedly, we give our mind more energy for other challenging tasks. Every habit we have, is there to serve us in some way. There’s a reward for each habit whether it’s healthy or unhealthy. Smoking is known to be bad on a conscious level, but the subconscious can associate smoking with feelings of relaxation or pleasure. And therefore, why it can be so difficult to change. Change can take place at a much more rapid level when the subconscious associations begin to shift.

Addictions are more powerful than just regular habits. Addictions don’t just have to be drugs, sex or gambling. An addiction is any obsessive behavior or habit that negatively alters our brain function and pattern of thinking. Examples are social media, video games, shopping, food, fighting, and pornography. Our bodies think we can’t survive without the substance or behavior. And over time addictions have the tendency to continue getting worse. The dopamine released from doing the behavior becomes less, and so the behavior continues to increase to experience the same amount of pleasure. There is a strong dependence to the substance or behavior making it incredibly difficult to stop.