119: Breaking Bad Habits

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Questions about the Video File:

  1. What’s hard about meditation?
  2. Why paying attention is hard?
  3. What’s the process for most behaviors? How do they turn into habits?
  4. How does mindfulness help with quitting smoking?
  5. What is prefrontal cortex and what does it do? When does it turn off?
  6. What’s mindfulness about?
  7. What happens when you become curious?

 

General Questions:

  1. What bad habits do you have?
  2. To what extent are you aware of your bad habits and their negative consequences?
  3. If you could quit one bad habit by magic, what would it be? How long have you had this habit? Have you ever attempted to quit it? What happened?
  4. Do you know anyone with nervous eating disorder? What causes it do you imagine?
  5. What personal techniques do you have to get rid of bad habits?
  6. What’s the most annoying habit to you? Do you know anyone close to you who has this habit? How do you react?
  7. Have you ever succeeded in quitting a bad habit? What is your secret?
  8. What is mindfulness?
  9. How can mindfulness help you quitting a bad habit?
  10. Have you ever meditated? What do you do? Do you find it pleasing or demanding?
  11. What percentage of your day do you act as if on autopilot? Think of various examples like driving to work without thinking which streets to take.
  12. What percentage of your day do you do things you are really aware of?

 

Related Quotes:

“Mindfulness helps us freeze the frame so that we can become aware of our sensations and experiences as they are, without the distorting coloration of socially conditioned responses or habitual reactions”. Henepola Gunaratana

“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.”  Jim Ryun

 

Related Idioms and Expressions:

  1. let go: stop thinking about something especially something negative.
  • Let go of your anger and you’ll see how relaxed you’ll be.
  1. At your fingertip: have easy access to something.
  • All the data was at her fingertip. She had it all saved on her computer.
  1. Creature of habit: a person who acted mostly based on habits rather than awareness
  • She’s a creature of habit, you can tell the time just by checking on her activities.
  1. Kick the habit: to give up a bad habit
  • She kicked the habit of smoking months ago. She doesn’t smoke anymore.

     5- To know something in your bones: to feel or understand something deeply

  • He knew in his bones that she would never come back.

 

Related Words and Phrases:

 

Drift off (phv): to fall sleep little by little

  • She drifted off as she was watching TV, after all it was a hard day and she was exhausted.

Evolutionary (n) related to the idea how living things have changed over millions of years

  • Walking on two feet rather than hands and feet seem like an evolutionary change that has taken place over time.

Urge (n) a strong desire to do something especially right away

  • She had this urge to leave the room immediately when people started to turn aggressive. It was hard to stop it.

Reinforcement (n) making something stronger

  • They needed reinforcement to win the war, they didn’t have enough soldiers.

Trigger (n) an event or condition that causes something bad to start

  • Darkness triggered all her feelings of insecurity and loneliness.

Nerd (n) an unattractive man who usually has embarrassing behavior in social situations; a person who knows a lot about one subject

  • Look at all those nerds at school. I don’t want to be one of them.

Rebel (n) a person who opposed to the rules usually through taking extreme measures.   

  • As a teenager I was such a rebel that I was in the principal’s office very day.

Dork (n) silly awkward person

  • What a dork, can’t you see she is way out of your league and yet you want to ask her out.

Morbidity (n) interest in unpleasant gloomy matters like death

  • Her room is dripping with morbidity, look at the black curtains, they totally match the gray bedsheets.

Mortality (n) the fact that human being doesn’t live forever

  • Human being has always tried to defeat mortality and live forever.

Tap into (phv) to use or apply something in a way that brings about success

  • Tap into your talents and start your own business, you have always been a good leader.

 Twist (n) change.

  • There was a twist in the events and she managed to get a better job.

Cognitive (adj) related to thinking and conscious mental processes

  • Everyone believed her deceptive anecdotes. She is such a good liar.

Wisdom (n) to think of something as separate or not connected

  • She totally disassociated herself from her job when she was at home.

Spell (n) being under the power of magic words

  • The witch put a spell on the prince and turned him to a frog.

Disenchanted (adj) no longer approve the value of something especially when you know about the hardships and problems

  • He was disenchanted by his new job when he evaluated the drawbacks.

Visceral (adj) guided by emotions rather than ration.

  • Her visceral happiness disappeared gradually.

Craving (n) a strong desire of wanting something

  • She had a craving for ice-cream. She stopped at the first supermarket and got loads of ice-cream.

Clobber (v) to defeat

  • She was clobbered by her fears. She was speechless and couldn’t do anything.

Distract (v) lose focus

  • It seemed loud music couldn’t distract him. He was studying hard.

Compulsively (adv) doing something suddenly and run by your urges

  • When she sees a kitten, compulsively she picks it up and cuddles it.

Perpetuate (v) to make something continue, especially something unfair or wrong

  • The new policies regarding weapons only perpetuates violence.

 

Please leave a response to the following question as a comment: 

To what extent are you aware of your bad habits and their negative consequences?

There are 6 Comments

The biggest my bad habit, began is the important work without planning. So I am not be successful in doing, or if it was done, I' m so tired because a lot of pressure bear 

Bad habits interrupt our daily life and prevent us from accomplishing our task and achieving our goals. They put our mental and physical health in danger and waste our time and energy in an improper way.
Most of the time bad habits are just a way of dealing with stress and triggered by stressful situations. Accordingly sometimes we get some biological benefits like smoking or drugs and sometimes it is an emotional benefit like when we stay in a relationship which is bad and harmful for us and we know about that. It seems that we were clobbered by our bad habits because of these benefits that we got and it would be very difficult to simply eliminate them.
As a medical doctor, definitely  I prefer treating a disease instead of treating its symptoms and the most important part of an efficient treatment is diagnosis.
So the first step you should take to cope with your bad habits and kick them, is walking through your unconsciousness into your awareness and replace these bad habits with good ones.
Sometimes it does not happen without an external help and we have to get some helpful feedbacks from our colleagues, friends or our acquaintances.
Actually I have been aware about almost 90 percent of my bad habits. Obviously they jeopardize my health and productivity and I need to control these bad habits and replace them with good ones.

  • accomplishing our task > accomplishing our tasks
  • and triggered by stressful > and are triggered by stressful
  • Accordingly sometimes > Accordingly, sometimes
  • So the first step you should take to cope with your bad habits and kick them > This is also correct:  So the first step you should take to cope with your bad habits and to kick them
  • some helpful feedbacks > some helpful feedback

All of us have some bad habits which can interrupt us during our life or in the way we want to reach our goals. We can find some of them by ourselves but we don't know our whole bad habits. It might be helpful if we ask our near friends and family to think about our bad habits so they can help us to know ourselves better. 

But in some cases we don't know if a special habit is good or not. For example I always write my tasks and do them based on the priority which I mention. I always think that it's a good habit to write all of my tasks, because I never lose a task, but now I've realized that I can't remember things, because I always count on my notes so my mind gets lazy because it thinks that always there's a note which let it know about tasks! So I'm trying to remember things instead of writhing them down! 

Therefore we should care about our habits to find out which one is really helpful and in what way. We should try to balance between our habits.

  • our near friends > our close friends
  • we don't know our whole bad habits > we don't know all our bad habits
  • For example I always write > For example, I always write
  • based on the priority which I mention?!
  • there's a note which let it know > there's a note which lets it know
  • instead of writhing them down > instead of writing them down! 
  • Therefore we should care > Therefore, we should care
  • try to balance between our habits > try to balance our (different) habits.

A habit is something that we do on a regular basis and we repeat it over and over again without any thinking. We all have some good and bad habits in our lives. The good ones can help us to reach our goals in life and the bad ones can damage our careers or even our lives.

When it comes to me I’m  almost aware of my bad habits but unfortunately despite of all the efforts I give, I cannot totally eliminate them from my behavior. For example I have a bad habit that i cannot decide by myself in a short time whether it’s about shopping something or even the bigger decisions like changing my job so I usually try to talk about these thing with trusted people and ask for their advice and opinions.