How many times were told this by your parents or a teacher? Perhaps you were disruptive, or acting out in appropriately and you were told to just Stop It!
But what about those habits that we develop over our lifetime…..the ones that we do without even thinking. They may control our lives and cause results we don’t want. Smoking, nail-biting, over-eating, or swearing. The list is endless. And what about the habit of not doing what we should when it is good for us like exercising, eating healthy, calling our mothers?
It’s so easy. All we have to do it stop the bad behaviour. If we wanted to end something bad or to quit a habit wouldn’t it be great to just say to yourself, “Stop it” and it would stop?
Well, unfortunately, it is not that easy.
Habits and bad behaviours get the best of us because we have engrained the action in our subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind is the storage house of everything you believe, whether you know it or not, and it is responsible for making sure what you think about gets delivered on time, every time, by acting on it through your body.
We know we should not do something but we do it anyways. Your conscious mind knows this to be true. But your subconscious mind, the controller of your body, acts out what you truly believe.
The key is that we need to retrain our subconscious mind into believing something else. Just telling it is not enough. It is like getting into a boxing match with Rocky. You need to be ready to face the opposition that is going to knock you down every time. You need to develop your mental muscles for the match against your subconscious mind.
You need to exercise your conscious mind on a regular basis so that is can overtake your subconscious mind. You start by forming the mental picture of what it is you want to overcome. If you currently have a bad habit, stop seeing yourself performing that action. Instead start visualizing yourself performing the new action you truly want.
You see what we mistakenly do is try to stop the behaviour when really what we need to do is to replace the vision of the behaviour and transplant that image into our subconscious mind.
This takes a lot of work using your imagination and your will. The only way to keep both of these active is to have a desire that will put them into overdrive. If your desire is strong enough, you can use these tools to create the image of the new action and overcome the habit whenever it creeps up.
While this is a bit of a challenge, the reward after just a few days will be enough encouragement to keep on going.
Of course, should this fail, then perhaps the infamous psychiatrist Bob Newhart can lend a hand.
