A year ago I was standing in line at the grocery store, when I saw the cover of a well-known national magazine with letters so large that they couldn’t be missed:

How to Break 

Your Bad Habits

So here we are again. It’s that time of year when so many of us focus on breaking things. Breaking bad things like habits.

Doesn’t sound like very much fun, does it?

You’re already seeing all kinds of articles, emails, tweets and posts reminding you of those New Year’s resolutions you’re supposed to want to make.

You might even feel enthusiastic and ready to take some steps forward.

But there’s a problem with this once-a-year jump into behavior change – it tends not to work. Many studies have discovered that most people who make New Year’s resolutions drop them by June, if not before.

If I could wave my magic wand, I’d free us all from our tendency to use the language of punishment, as if this was the best way to create change. You can help your best intentions by dropping punishing language, because there are lots of bad feelings that go along with those words.

The problem lies in the difference between the future that you want (and deserve) and how you feel about yourself now. It’s very hard for most of us to separate our behavior from our sense of who we are. That means something inside makes a link between “bad habits” and “bad me.” Add in the extra measure of “breaking” those bad habits, and you’re dealing with an underlying problem that makes it all the harder to turn around the behaviors you so want to change.

Habits aren’t intrinsically bad, and neither are they things to be broken, like dishes thrown against a wall.

They’re not only normal; they’re essential! If you didn’t develop habits around your daily routines – from getting out of bed when you wake up, all the way to getting back into bed to return to dreamland – you’d spend all of your time reinventing the wheel for every single thing, over and over every single day.

Imagine that!

Fortunately, for the most part, your habits are your friends. The human ability to habituate makes it possible for you to learn new behaviors and with practice, maintain them in the background — without having to think about them. For instance, you probably don’t remember learning to walk, but if you’ve ever been around a baby taking on this task, you recognize how much work it is to stand up, fall down, maintain balance and eventually move from one place to another. You might remember the first times you moved to music, whether you were dancing with a partner or just matching a beat. None of this can happen without those first hard steps, and yet by the time you’re dancing you just do it. Isn’t that magnificent?

Without habits, there’d be no time left in your day for the creative part of you that seems to make human beings different from most other life on the planet.

And, among other things, your habits leave this creative aspect of you free to address those very, very few behaviors that get in the way of a happier life. You may not realize that there’s a difference between honestly stating the discomfort that you’re in and denouncing yourself for being there. Growing the capacity to live with this difference is an important first step in making any kind of change you want to make.

So if you feel driven to get rid of a bad habit, start with being kind to yourself instead. A habit that makes you feel unhappy does not need to be broken. It simply wants to be healed.

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If you experience frustration from being trapped in behaviors you can’t change, as a holistic therapist and addiction specialist, I am here to partner with you in creating your own personal path to lasting transformation and freedom.  Choose support now!