Our bad habits , or bad habits in English, are the result of our bad behaviors, which are the result of repeated actions from the past until they become our bad habits in the present.
For example, bad habits such as biting your nails, biting your fingers, curling your hair, rolling your eyes, picking your nose, and arching your back, etc. Many of us have probably encountered people with these habits before, whether from ourselves or from people around us. However, these bad habits may seem very minor when compared to addiction to alcohol, cigarettes, gambling, drugs, or being pessimistic.
These bad habits, even though we know they are bad, why can’t we stop them?
Bad Habit means bad habits or bad behaviors that arise from the mind. Whenever we do these bad behaviors more often, from every day (many times a day) to every week (many times a week) until it becomes every month, we will become addicted to these behaviors and actions until they become ingrained and become our bad habits or bad habits.
The impact of bad habits
Some people may think that having bad habits is not a big deal, but they don’t know that the results of having bad habits can affect our lives and property. For example, addiction to smoking or drinking alcohol.
According to data from the World Health Organization, the death rate caused by cigarettes is as high as 5 million people per year. Alcohol is the cause of death of the world’s population, up to 3.3 million people per year. In our country alone, more than 50,000 Thai people die from alcohol per year.
Or mobile phone behavior while driving. From research by Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT) , which collected road accident data in the United States, it was found that more than 52% of all accidents were caused by drivers losing their focus because they were too busy playing with their mobile phones. This is just an example of the results of our bad habits.
Why is it so difficult to do something with intent without any interference?
Let’s think back to when we were still studying at school, whether it was elementary school, high school, or university. Why, while we were studying, did we have to play with our phones, talk to our friends, make plans to go play football after school, or think about what to eat in front of the school after school, even though we knew that our duty now was to study hard and listen to the teacher until the end?
Or even when we are working, during meetings, we still secretly use our phones to chat with friends on Line or search for delicious food to eat for lunch or maybe watch someone review a product, which we know deep down that this kind of behavior should not be done, but we still can’t help but do it.
And of course, while we are reading this article, we may also be doing other things at the same time. This kind of behavior is the beginning of creating and accumulating bad habits in ourselves.
The story of chocolate cake
Have we ever heard the story about chocolate cake?
Dr. Judson Brewer, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where he is the Director of Research at the Center for Mindfulness, talks about the “Science of Self-Learning” and using mindfulness to control bad habits.
Dr. Juddson Brewer says that when we see chocolate cake, there’s a little voice in our head that says, “Food!” “Eat it!” “We’re going to survive.” And luckily, chocolate cake is a sugary food, so when we eat it, it makes us feel good when we taste it. And this is what our brain remembers as…
“I saw the chocolate cake, ate the chocolate cake, felt good, I’ll do it again.”
But the intelligence of the human brain can go further. After we feel good from eating chocolate cake, the brain processes and comes up with the following results:
So every time we feel down, “Let’s eat some chocolate cake, and we’ll feel better.”
But what’s even more interesting is that the brain doesn’t just remember chocolate cake.
If our brains could create habits, let’s say chocolate cake. But on the other hand, back when we were in college, we looked out the window and saw a group of boys smoking a cigarette. In our brain, a voice shouted in our ears, “That’s cool!”
After that, it becomes a process similar to the chocolate cake case, where we feel that “smoking is cool, smoking is cool, and we have to do it again.” We learn these processes by doing it to look cool, until it becomes a habit, and after that, even if it is not cool anymore, we will still do it.
And in fact, our brains do not remember only about chocolate cake or cigarettes. Our good and bad habits are created by our “persuasion, behavior and repetition” until they eventually become habits.
I want us to think about habits that arise from persuasion, whether from seeing, meeting or talking to friends or anyone, and then we do it repeatedly until it becomes a habit without realizing it. For example, it might be about making plans to party, drinking heavily on Friday because we don’t have to go to work on Saturday, or it might be about shopping madly on payday, or it might be curling our hair or biting our nails when we are nervous about presenting a project to our boss, etc.
I’m not telling you to stop, but I’m telling you to be curious.
Dr. Juddson Brewer conducted a study to see if mindfulness training could help people quit smoking. He found that telling people to quit smoking had the same effect as telling them to just focus on their breathing. Of course, it was a failure and ineffective method.
Everyone who thinks about quitting smoking has failed at least six times in their attempts to not smoke at all. So he doesn’t recommend quitting, he recommends smoking. “Smoke it, go ahead,” are the words he always tells his participants. And he doesn’t use a sarcastic tone. Instead, he recommends that everyone smoke, and be curious. Think about what it’s like to smoke, how it feels, what it tastes like, what you get out of it while you smoke.
“Smoking mindfully, cigarettes smell like stinky cheese and taste like chemicals. Ugh.”
One of the smokers who participated in the program spoke after she tried mindful smoking and became curious while smoking. After she discovered the truth about cigarettes, her urges began to diminish. She discovered a new urge: “Cigarettes taste like shit.” As her curiosity increased, she began to think this way more often while smoking, and the urges began to disappear until one day she finally lost interest in them.
“Cigarettes taste like shit. I don’t want to smoke them. I repeat the process and a new process will be created to replace them.”
Unfortunately, this part of the brain goes offline when we are stressed. The prefrontal cortex is the youngest part of the brain, and it uses our knowledge and development to control our behavior. But the worst thing is that stress can cause this part of the brain to go offline, or stop working, and we fall back into our old habits. For example, we tend to yell at our children, spouses, or escape to have a quiet cigarette break when we are stressed and tired, even though we know it is not helpful, but we still insist on doing these behaviors.
We can change these bad habits by being curious.
Being curious while we are doing bad habits is just focusing and tricking the brain into thinking about the real benefits that we will get from doing those behaviors .
When we are curious and curious every day about the behaviors we have yet to stop doing, we discover that we do not seek to stop doing them, nor do we necessarily seek to eliminate the urges, but rather find a desire to do other things, supported by curiosity.
Dr. Juddson Brewer says that when our curiosity becomes less and less motivated, we will start to be interested in finding new things to replace our old behaviors. We will be eager to know the new results of our new behaviors.
For example, if we smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, the result is that our teeth will be yellow and we will have a dry cough often. After that, we are curious and interested in the results we get, so we start the experiment by smoking only half a pack a day and see that the results make a difference.
Curiosity will encourage experimenting again and again. The next experiment may lead us to discover that throwing away the cigarette pack and going for a cup of hot green tea may be better than the previous results.
“Let curiosity be a tool to change our bad habits and create new, better ones to replace them.”
Conclusion
It is said that bad habits will definitely not have a good effect on us. It does not matter what kind of bad habit we have, but what is important is whether we learn and are curious while doing it or not.
If we understand the negative effects of such behavior, we will understand the negative effects it has on us, whether it is in terms of stress, health, love, or work. These things will raise important questions for ourselves, which are: Will we continue to do bad habits ? And are we ready to step out of these habits ?
“Today, do we realize what bad habits we have committed?”
Thanks for the information and story from: TEDMED – A simple way to break a bad habit break a bad habit
