Have you ever tried to get rid of a habit?

How successful are you in it?

If you are successful, I am happy.

But if you are struggling, then I have different tips.

I have applied them in my life and was able to break some of my habits and created new ones.

I am going to share them in this article.

Where are You Directing Your Energy?

Have you ever meditated?

Yes, you might be doing it or not.

As you know, meditation is a state where you no longer have any thoughts.

For this reason, whenever a person starts meditating, he focuses on controlling his thoughts.

And you know what happens?

He starts getting thoughts continuously, due to which he can’t focus on his breath.

But, once he starts ignoring the thoughts, he reaches a state of complete calmness.

Here is a catch, where your focus goes, the energy flows, and it manifests.

In the same way, whenever someone wants to break their habits, they focus their energy on breaking their old habits instead of focusing on a new one they want to form in its place.

That is the reason they won’t be able to break their habits.

Even Mother Theresa also agrees to peace campaigns only but not those against violence.

— Source: Secret Book by Rhonda Byrne.

You already know the reason by now.

Focus on Higher Purposes

As I already mentioned, focusing on new habit is a good thing.

But what if you watch movies instead of playing games on mobile when you want to get rid of your gaming habit?

Yes, it doesn’t serve anything.

So, you have to focus on a higher purpose.

Most of the habits we want to get rid of are for instant gratification.

So, when we focus on higher purposes, we can stay on our journey even though the initial days are difficult.

Once you are so involved in it, your feeling for instant gratification goes away.

It takes 21 Day to Form New Neural Patterns!

It worked very well for me.

Whenever I want to break any habit, I decide what to do instead and keep doing it without focusing on the old.

You know what?

I was able to get rid of those habits successfully many times.

Some of the habits I got rid of are below.

1. I successfully stopped playing games on mobile. (I was an addict for more than ten years.)
2. Eating ice cream (I was mad over them since childhood)
3. Eating non-veg. (Been a vegetarian for more than 12 months but going to start my 21 days of being away from non-veg soon)

Even my mom was shocked when I told her I quitted non-veg. (You can understand how much I love non-veg from this incident😅)

Never forget about this!

You can plan everything perfectly. But if you miss this one thing, you won’t be successful in your attempt.

Can you make a guess what it is?

No.

It is having a strong why.

For the success of anything, you should have a powerful reason why you should accomplish that.

The bigger the reason you have, the stronger will be your willpower to keep you on track.

I have tried more than four times before finally able to get over my habit of eating non-veg.

It is because of not having a good reason why I have to get rid of it.

Are you thinking about how I got a strong reason to stay away from non-veg? It is because of watching a documentary called The Game Changers.

Even though focusing on all of these, you may not able to get rid of some of your old habits. It is probably you don’t know why it is happening. Let’s focus on it in the next section.

Do You Know Why You Can’t Give Up On Your Old Habits?

You must be thinking what is the relevance of this image.

Those two guys are your old habits and pulling you back even if you went out of the frame.

If this doesn’t interest you to read this article, I don’t know what will.

If my words are making sense to you, stay with me till the end to kick those guys and become free from them.

“If you know the reason behind your challenges, then half work is done.

The next half is figuring out how to get over them.”

But, I haven’t given much emphasis on the reasons why we can’t get over them.

Or you can say what is stopping you from giving up your old habits.

So, I am writing this article to fill that void.

I am sharing some of the reasons that I understood from my personal experience and my interpretations.

If you stay till the end, I will share one of the biggest reasons.

If you know that reason, you can do anything in your life when you fix it.

Let’s, first, go with the spiritual aspect — the Law of Attraction.

Can Law of Attraction Act Against Us?

If you know about the law of attraction, you must be knowing LOA(hereon I refer to Law of Attraction as LOA) makes the universe work for you. All you need to do is manifest your dreams.

But there’s one reason (which I am going to disclose at the ending) it keeps us away from using LOA to achieve our goals.

Due to that particular reason majority don’t use LOA.

Let me tell you the consequences of this with an example.

Let’s consider you have fertile farmland.

Suppose, if you leave the land untouched for years, what happens next?

Yes, weed and unwanted plants will grow in the entire space.

In such a condition, will it be useful for agriculture if you go after ten years?

No. Also, it requires a lot of efforts to make it fit for agriculture.

In the same way, the law of attraction is great, but we don’t know how to use it. (it’s due to lack of knowledge)

So, it acts against us.

The reason is we focus on leaving our old habits, and we end up being with our old habits. (I will share why this happens in tomorrow’s article)

Let’s look at the second reason from the science perspective — Newton’s Laws of Motion.

How Newton’s Laws are Related to Your Old Habits?

Why use my brain all the time? So I am taking the help of third party resource.😜

Here is a simple definition of Newton’s First Law.

“Newton’s first law states that, if a body is at rest or moving at a constant speed in a straight line, it will remain at rest or keep moving in a straight line at constant speed unless it is acted upon by a force.”

— Source: Britannica.com

As per the second law, the force on an object = mass*acceleration.

Now let’s go to our favourite law, the third one,

“Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”

You must be thinking what must be the reason behind them.

(Or)

You must be thinking I am mad.

I went back to my school days, so I used this format.😂

Let’s get back to our topic.

As per the first law, when we don’t try to change, we continue with our old habits. (it’s an open secret😆)

But, now, you decided to change, so using the second law, you tried to change your habits with the help of your conscious decisions (force).

Here the acceleration doesn’t have much significance, but mass had much because it is the strength of our habits. (I mean how much we are addicted to the older habits)

More force requires more energy.

So, as your levels of addiction are more, you need to use a lot of force to change your habits.

At this point, the villain enters, which is the third law.

Here villain takes the side of your old habits.

So the old habits use equal force(reaction) to pull you back to them when you try to replace them with new ones. (action)

Here comes the end to our second reason.

Let’s go to the last reason in psychology perspective — The Protective Side of the Brain.

Why Katappa Killed Baahubali?

You must be thinking this is an irrelevant title.

Yes, here the situation is also like this.

The protective side of the brain has to protect you. But it backstabs you(yes, out of ignorance, just like Katappa) when you want to change your habits.😂😂

Let’s understand why this happens,

As we know, we have a Right Side Brain and a Left Side Brain.

In the same way, we have a protective brain(inner voice) and a conscious brain(our thoughts).

Protective Brain always wants to keep us safe, and change makes us uncomfortable in the beginning.

So, our inner voice gives us many reasons why we shouldn’t do(what we are supposed to do).

So, if we are more addicted to a habit, it has more reasons to give.

When we hear more reasons, our tendency to continue in our goals reduces.

The only solution to this is strengthening our willpower.

And the only way to strengthen is doing meditation (which is harder for me as well😳)

Due to this, it becomes hard for us to get rid of our old habits.

As you are still with me, I want to share a bonus tip.

Understand Your Triggers.

For every habit, there will be some triggers.

In my case, I have been trying very hard to stop watching movies.

For me triggers are, watching any scene from any movie.

The cycle goes like this, I decide to stop watching movies — someone in the home turns the TV on and keep movie — When taking a break from work, I watch TV (as it is running) — For 3-hour gratification(yes, I coined this😜) I end up watching the movie — Then I come back to my old habit of watching movies.🤣🤣

Also, I thought of asking for your suggestions on how to get rid of this habit when I started writing this article.

But, I think I got a solution — Yes, it is meditation.

But even making it a habit has become challenging for me🙈

Again the reasons are what I stated here.

Understood, I have to overcome this at any cost.

Do you also have any old habits which you are struggling to change?

Let’s work together and help each other to win over our challenges.

Did I miss anything? I would love to know what is resonating with you. Also, share your thoughts by commenting below.