Little Habits That Get You Down

Today I couldn’t stop thinking about habits. A settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up. They say that it takes about sixty six days for a new bahaviour to become automatic. We’ve all been there, struggling to go to the gym, or maybe trying our hardest not to bite our nails. However, and as hard as it is turn a random activity into a habit, it’s a thousand times harder to abandon that same habit once it has settled into our daily routine.

We all have that friend who smokes out of his ass and can’t seem to stop, or perhaps a parent whose addiction to sugar led him down the diabetes path. With all these scary stories hovering around us, you would think we would’ve learned by now. Some things we shouldn’t indulge in. Why do we? Is the rush of the moment better than the bitter aftertaste of tomorrow? Are a couple of seconds of enjoyment really worth a lifetime of consequences?

Why is it so hard for us to let go of that which we know is wrong for us? Even worse, why do we actively pursue it? Our actions sometimes can’t be described as anything other than masochism. We hurt ourselves, but we simply can’t let go. We’d rather have the pain, knowing that we at least have some sense of comfort still waiting for us. We’re terrified of finding ourselves alone, without anything to fall back on.

The terrifying truth is that we prefer to be accompanied by evil rather than to have no company at all.

Alone is alone, after all. But when is alone good? Is being next to something that could kill you really better than being next to nothing at all? Is the emptiness of a solitary bed worth the presence of the next best thing? More often than not, it is the fear of pain that prevents us from letting go of our most unhealthy obsessions. An alcoholic fears the absence of alcohol because of the painful detox process; a drug addict refuses to quit the poison because he’ll miss the highs he experiences while under the influence. And someone in a relationship refuses to break away because he dreads the moment when he finds himself alone and the pain becomes unbearable.

We all have a point when we simply can’t take it anymore. Some bodies simply break and die, unable to keep going. In relationships, we often find ourselves in a situation that’s so heavy, so inescapable that we simply can’t ignore the truth anymore. The worst part is when we wait for that moment to be reached, when we allow ourselves to stay and keep going instead of ending it the moment a red flag comes along.

Why do we allow ourselves to go through all that? If it’s the pain that we’re truly afraid of, why are we so willing to suffer voluntarily? And why do we allow ourselves to lose control of our own life in service of someone else? How do we know when enough is enough?

When does the fear of pain become more powerful than pain itself?

There seems to be a way to battle our own demons, however. For smokers, there’s the patch; for alcoholics, AA. For relationships, some might say therapy, but we’re still missing that seemingly magical solution that would fix our love lives.

Perhaps the scary answer is, there is no solution available, because the solution is within us. I’m not here to give that whole You’re your own solution speech, because while it’s probably truth, I’m not one to preach. But according to 1960s pop psychology book Psycho-Cybernatics, it takes some twenty-one days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to gel. Charlotte from Sex and the City says it takes half the time of a relationship’s duration to get over a said relationship.

So if the answer lies somewhere between twenty-one days and one year, we’re pretty much still in the dark. Bear in mind, however, that darkness is just the absence of light. And light never stays away for too long.