Are Bad Habits Running Your Schedule?
How to Break the Cycle

By Jacqueline Sidman, Ph.D.

April 2005

Does this sound like a typical day to you? The alarm goes off and you hit the snooze button, knowing from experience that doing so will make you late for work again?  On your way to work, you light up your morning cigarette, putting it out as you stop off at Starbucks for the espresso that you know you will need in order to get through the morning. In the office, the way you tap your pen against your teeth drives your co-workers nuts, but you can’t think properly if you don’t do it? After work, you visit your favorite fast food joint for a burger and fries (that diet will just have to wait until Monday)?  After sitting at your usual bar stool in a drinking establishment where the staff know you by name, you go home and surf the net into the wee hours of the morning, using your credit card to buy stuff that you really can’t afford?

Even if you don’t recognize yourself in that portrait, chances are you have some negative behavior patterns with harmful consequences for you and the people around you.  After taking action to break these patterns, many people find themselves slipping back into their old habits after a short time, because they made no real change on the inside. Regardless of what your bad habit is, below are some strategies to help you break them.

1. Recognize the root cause.

The first step towards breaking bad habits is to recognize their roots in your childhood. This is not always easy, as the mind sometimes suppresses unpleasant memories, or the connections can be obscure.

The Sidman Solution® can help here, as it unlocks memories from the subconscious that the conscious mind has blocked, but some patterns are easy to recognize, even without it. For example, overeating is often a result of not having enough food as a child. The overeating adult’s subconscious is reassuring them that they will never go hungry again. Or, smokers may have had parents who smoke, which caused them to see it as something that grown-ups do.

2. Want to change your ways.

Once you have identified the causes of your bad habits, the next step is to want to change. Focus on the positive benefits to you of changing your habits. Use your imagination to picture yourself free of the habit, and the improvements that breaking it will bring to your life.

3. Don’t resist the change.

Once you make the decision to change, resistance will start to set in. Breaking bad habits involves coming out of your comfort zone, and your mind will start to resist the change. This can take many forms, either psychological or physical. All sorts of fears will start to set in, and physical ailments can start to develop, ranging from tension headaches to potentially life-threatening illnesses.

Resistance means that outdated or false information remains imprinted in your mind, and is preventing you from getting what you want. Feelings are more powerful than thoughts, so even when your rational mind knows what you want and how to get it, feelings of resistance can prevent you from taking the actions that you know you need to take in order to achieve your goals. These inappropriate fears are defense mechanisms against a phantom foe. They mean that the mind has corrupted the perfectly healthy psychological defenses that it creates to guard against real dangers, and is using them against an imaginary enemy.

4. Overcome your fears.

Overcoming your fears means coming out of the comfort zone that you created for yourself in childhood. Our subconscious minds operates in predictable, pre-programmed ways, responding to stimuli in the same way that they did when we were children, even if the response is no longer appropriate. Our conscious minds, on the other hand, are far more capable of adapting to changing circumstances and creating appropriate responses to external stimuli.

Overcoming inappropriate fears somewhat involves using your conscious mind to reprogram your subconscious. Ultimately, by going directly to the subconscious mind with The Sidman Solution®, many years of struggle can be eliminated.  This does not mean that we need to become like Spock in Star Trek, coldly logical and mistrusting emotion. Far from it. Emotions, when appropriate, are a beautiful thing. Human beings were born to feel; it is what separates us from machines. But we need to learn to recognize inappropriate emotions and release the unwanted baggage that, if unchecked, could lead to those emotions taking over our lives.

5. Manage your emotions.

How do you tell the difference between an appropriate and an inappropriate emotion? Simply put, responding to a situation is appropriate; over-reacting is inappropriate. If a person is in control of his or her subconscious, even feelings of disappointment are temporary and manageable. If they are not, then these feelings turn into ones of stress, anxiety and depression.

So, what does this have to do with bad habits? Well, bad habits are rooted in fear. We are afraid of the mostly imaginary negative consequences of breaking our habit. For example, a person’s subconscious mind might tell them that if they don’t super-size their fries at a fast food restaurant, they will go hungry, just like when they were a child and had to accept smaller portions at mealtimes so that there was enough food for their brothers and sisters. That person’s rational, conscious mind knows full well that a regular portion of fries is enough to fill up most people, but the subconscious is far stronger than the conscious mind, meaning that feelings will trump logic every time. The fear is a response to a circumstance that was true in their childhood, but not now as an adult.

6. The Glow from Within

Once you conquer your fear about what can happen, you will begin to feel peaceful, more in control, less over-emotional, and more joyful. Negative emotions will not have a hold on you; the negative chatter will stop repeating in your brain. How long does the change usually take? It takes a heartbeat if you do it right. If you get to where your subconscious formed the bad habit and you can reprogram that moment, you can be different from then on. You will be happier, more confident, more creative, and more successful in all areas of your life.

About the Author:

Jacqueline Sidman, Ph.D. is a respected author, speaker, president of The Sidman Institute, Inc. and creator of The Sidman Solution®. Dr. Sidman has over seventeen years’ experience helping others overcome life challenges. She is the author of Instant Inner Peace! End Your Inner Struggle & Feel Better Right Now!©