Reverb13 Day 16: Addicted to Habits?

tyunglebower ♦ December 16, 2013 ♦ 4 Comments

Habits and addictions, some are silly, some serious; when we have issues without answers, they can hold us so tight that we stop moving forward with the life we intended.

Were you able to loosen those fetters this year, and if you were successful, how did you manage it? Did you accept outside help, or work alone?

If you still feel that grasp of addiction or hurtful habits, what will you do differently in the year to come?

I suffer no official addictions. A few bad habits, maybe. But the funny thing about bad habits sometimes, at least for me, is that they often start off as good habits. Or at least habits that I initiate with the hope of doing good.

I find that sometimes certain habits work for a while. I sleep better when I get into this habit, or get more exercise when I develop that habit. But in all too short a time it seems, the habit, the ritual, the regularity of the activity becomes the mission more than the success at which I was aiming in the first place. What starts off as a pointed self-discipline designed to prevent me from giving up on something before it has a chance to work turns into something that I won’t call OCD, but at least a manifestation of my own stubbornness after it stops working.

Would this perhaps be an addiction to habit itself? I don’t know. Perhaps there is something to that. Habit, ritual, structure are, after all some of my favorite things when it comes to achieving goals. Could my innate desire for more of those things actually cause a certain unhealthy dependency on same? I don’t have an answer to that.

As for the prompt, I think I am better now at not succumbing to habit for habit’s sake than I used to be. But that’s not intrinsic to this year. Nor will the tendency disappear next year. I think it’s a slow process of establishing an assessment metric by which I can decide what habits are worth keeping long run, and which should be dismissed in the near future.

I intend to see, (as I have mentioned on this blog numerous times) if I suffer from clinical anxiety starting next year. Perhaps these things are related to that. And if not, perhaps it can be a side issue I can explore on that journey.