Here on the Thoughts that Bind, we take a healthy consideration towards habits. We want to break our bad habits, build better habits, and all that comes with any of that. And there’s one thing a lot of us don’t take into account when we’re trying to better ourselves, which is how bad habits form in the first place.
The reason I wanted to shed light on this subject is very specific. It’s not easy to build new habits, but it is easier, with some attention to detail, to not build bad ones. Easier, I said. Not easy.
Bad habits in the making
I think most of us can reason how bad habits are made. We just repeat something enough times and it starts to make up the fabric of who we are. A former teacher of mine used to say it all the time: practice makes permanent. We know this on some level, even if it’s not at the forefront of our minds.
But I think I’ve figured out the problem. Because knowing this is not really stopping us from forming bad habits, right? Stay with me though, because I’m going to talk about mindfulness again.
The problem
We don’t really have much respect for the present moment, as a society right now. This manifests in a lot of weird ways, but this is one of them. We respect the idea of the future, for what it can bring us. And we revere the past because there’s no changing it, so it looms large in its absolutes. But the present, really, it seems like such a small thing in comparison. And it is. The past and future stretch out in front and behind us infinitely, while the present is such a small sliver, it doesn’t really “mean anything”. But it means everything.
We need a new way of looking at the present. It’s more of a doorway. In the present, you can take all you’ve learned from the past, mix it with your will and use it to direct your future. The present is your point of power.
So…bad habits?
So the awful, simple answer of “how are bad habits made?” is this: “every single moment that you think your goal isn’t that important and you push it off or take a shortcut or think that you’ll get to it eventually”, that’s where bad habits come from.
The embarrassing fact is that all our bad habits in our personal lives are entirely fault. If we had a rewind button on our lives and played them back to watch, we would see all the little moments where instead of taking initiative, we sat on our butts expecting future us to take care of our flaws. I know, how uncomfortable.
But this means that we have control over it! By continually checking in with ourselves and keeping ourselves accountable for the little things we know we should be doing, we can make real strides in our lives. Like, for the first time in maybe a long time, we truly come alive and put our hands on the wheel. So come alive, my friends. Take the wheel.
