Chapter 4: breaking bad habits

Delayed gratification is the foundation of breaking bad habits. It is a lot harder to quit bad habits that it is to form new, good ones. Quitting sugar, alcohol, cigarettes, junk food or binge watching might make you feel uncomfortable or anxious, depending on the level of addiction you have.

Instant gratification, the act of not resisting the temptation to do something that you know is not good for you is, in a way, immoral. You get huge quantities of dopamine without any effort at all. Instead of working hard to eventually get some result that you can be proud of, you eat sweets or watch a movie and get rewarded immediately. This makes you lazier. Once you give your brain immediate reward your brain will further look for ways to get dopamine without any effort. So if you have one such habit, it is very likely for you to develop more of them, and the more you have the harder it is to be productive and, basically, not waste your life.

Someone, let's call him James, got rid of his addiction for playing video games. He wanted to break his bad habit because he realized that he was wasting his life and had no time to do something meaningful. After two years of not playing video games he decided to play a game he was addicted to, to see how his brain will react. After this experiment he observed that he became lazier. "Books became boring again" - he said. And that after playing for only two hours. Now, imagine what effect a form of instant gratification has on our brain when sticking to a bad habit for many years. Why going out with your friends and socialize when you can play a game? Why going out and making new friends when you can post a photo and get dopamine from the likes you are getting? Why putting the effort to run for 15 minutes and feel better for the rest of day when you can eat some junk food and feel better immediately? In all these cases choosing instant gratification has long term consequences as laziness, unproductiveness, losing the joy of life, health problems, socializing problems. As you get addicted to a form of instant gratification you need more and more to satisfy your brain. This leads to spending even more time on your bad habits and developing more of them. At this point, if you don't satisfy your brains' need for dopamine you fell really bad or even depressed.

Have you ever felt like you have a hole inside of you? Did that make you feel unhappy and you didn't know how to fix that? All of us have a hole inside us, a feeling of incompletion, a lack of meaning in our lives. Most people fill that hole with junk food, alcohol, sweet and many others. But the problem is that this kind of things fill the hole for a very short period of time, so that we need more and more of them. Unfortunately, you can't get rid of the hole no matter how hard you try. But this hole can be shrunk. When we do thing that we love doing and when we live healthier we slowly make the hole smaller. When we become better at what we like, and eventually get to live off of doing it, only then we are truly happy and the hole becomes so small we barely even notice that it's there.

So how does one go about breaking a bad habit? First step is to ask yourself what bad habit you have that you want to get rid of. And you want to make sure that you commit to breaking that habit. As Jordan Peterson said, you can't convince someone to do something if they don't want to do it. You can't even convince yourself to do things you don't want. So, before breaking a bad habit, make sure that you want to do so. Also, write down some of the reasons that make you want to get rid of it. Even one reason is enough.

Then, you need to identify why you are doing what you do, even though you know it is not good for you and your life would be better if you were to stop it. Try to find something that is not as harmful as your bad habit, but feels pretty much the same.

When I first decided that I want to quit carbonated drinks I found out than it was not the carbonated feeling that I liked, but I just like drinking something that tasted good, so I swapped over to drinking smoothies. I did so for a couple of months then I started to slowly reduce to frequency of those until I drank only water and homemade tea, and I did so for the last two years.

Something that really was helping was, you can say, a shift in mentality. Many people refer to it as identification. For example, it might become easier to quit smoking if, instead of saying that you are trying to quit you will says that you don't smoke. That way you identify yourself not as someone that is smoking but tries not to, but rather as someone that straight up does not smoke and that makes things a lot easier. Many times I get asked if I am on a diet because I drink only water and tea. I don't say to people that I try to quit carbonated drinks. Instead I tell them that I don't like drinking them and also, that I don't drink them because I don't feel good after it. Whether this is true or not, saying it out loud makes your brain believe in what you are saying so if say to yourself enough times that you are not a smoker your brain will come to some logical conclusions: if I'm am not a smoker then I shouldn't buy cigarettes, and if someone asks me if I want a cigarette I will refuse because I am not a smoker.

The idea of quitting something forever might be overwhelming at first. So start small, let's say, with a 30 days challenge. Don't feel discouraged if you can't resist to temptations and fail to quit for 30 days. Try again, and again, and again. You can't fix overnight an addiction that was made stronger and stronger over the course of many years. But, the higher of a streak you can get the better the effect would be, although you most probably won't feel any different.

Try applying the 10 minute rule when you feel the urge to smoke, to drink, or play video games. Every time you feel an urge, say to yourself that you will do it but before that, stay for 10 minutes and reflect over the urge. Observe how the brain is giving you thoughts about doing something that you know will make feel worse.

Another way to avoid going back to your bad habits is not be able to. Want to quit smoking? Don't buy cigarettes and don't go in places where smoking is a common thing. Want to quit drinking? Don't buy alcohol and don't go to pubs. Want to eat healthier? Buy healthier food instead of junk food. Want to quit video games? Uninstall games from your computer and phone. Want to quit watching TV? Unplug it and even get it out of your room. No matter what habit you are trying to break you can always change your environment so that it will become harder to commit to a bad habit. That is a way we can make use of our laziness. My teacher used to joke:" It's easier not to do something than to do it, so don't make noise".

If you are trying to break a habit that makes you waste your time, like playing games or staying on internet too much, before starting to just not do them make sure that you have something to do with that spare time. An average person wastes about 4 to 6 hours a day on internet. What are going to do with that amount of free time? Maybe you have things that you always wanted to do but "never had the time" to do it. Maybe you have an exam coming up or stuff to do for your job. This is the perfect opportunity to stop procrastinating and to start making small progress daily. Believe me, it's amazing how big of a progress you can make over a big period of time if you do something daily. So, as Jordan Peterson said: "Pick something, rather than nothing" and start shrinking that hole that makes you unhappy and unfulfilled.