Dealing with Addictions/Bad Habits

"It isn't that you are trying to quit addiction/bad habit. It's not the right way to think about it. The right way to think about it is that you are trying to figure out how to have a better life and so you have to figure out , well I would say, do the future authoring program and keep your addiction/bad habit in mind and think.

So in the part of the future authoring program it asks you a bunch of questions about what your life could be like in three to five years if you took care of yourself like you were someone that you cared for and then it asks you questions about your friends and your family and your career and your time outside of your work and your health and, you know, the important dimensions of life and it asks you to spend 20 minutes writting about how good your life could be in three to five years if you got your act together and did what was good for you and then it asked you to write about the hell you could be in if you did't.

So I would say, you really need to do that because the addiction/bad habit isn't the issue. The issue is that you are not living your life the way you want to. So you need a vision of life that's more compelling than the addiction/bad habits and you need a counter too that frightens you, you know, because adddiction/bad habit otherwise is obviosly, extraordinarily gratifying in the short term, but you seem to be suffering for the medium to long term consequences of its use/presence.

So you need a story that you can tell yourself that's really deeply thought thorough about why this is not appropriate for you, how it's hurting you and how it's minimizing you and perhaps making you embarrassed and ashamed and more socially isolated and all of that. 

So I would say, think about it as cleaning up your psyche and your behaviour rather than merely stopping addiction/bad habit. You also might wanna write down and you could do this in a negative vision, part of the future authoring program. You got to write down everything bad that you think addiction/bad habit is doing to you, because obviously, you have suspicions that this is not you in some important way.

So you need to be fully cognizant of what those ways are and then take them seriously and decide if that's the pathway through life on which you wish to travel and so on. Then I would also say good luck to you. It's a very good idea to identify one of your weaknesses and work on it. You can strengthen yourself substantially by doing that."

                                                                       -Jordan B. Peterson

Source:Youtube