Bad Habits You Keep

You may just not want to give up all of your bad habits. One of the reasons that we keep bad habits around is because they comfort us. Not all of them do, of course, but some of them had a very good reason for being started. A cigarette so you have a good excuse to get out of the madhouse. A bowl of ice cream on those lonely nights. A racist joke that gets you attention and sometimes laughs. Most bad habits were started for a reason, whether you knew it or not, and to deprive you of them would be cruel…to a degree.
What’s the true cruelty is depriving you of what the bad habit gives you – a reprieve from the family, a reprieve from thinking about your loneliness, attention that you just can’t seem to get somehow else. If only there was some way you could get the benefit without the cost – damage to your health or reputation. There may be. In most people’s lives there is. Not for everyone, but for most. In those cases, what do you do?
First and foremost, you try everything you can in order to get the benefit without the cost. You find a different reason to step out of the house (lawn work, taking out the garbage, walking the dog), or a different way to ease the loneliness (volunteering, reading, church group, on-line chat rooms (this is assuming that if you could just join some interesting social group, you would have already)), or a different way to get attention (excellence of work, jokes that aren’t offensive, tidbits of news or bizarre facts). And if you can’t for whatever reason (trust me, we can play “what if” forever), then you reduce the bad habit as much as you can.
Find the longest lasting cigarette you can and smoke only one of them when you go out. Eat fat free ice cream or only half a bowl instead of a full bowl (or leave off the sprinkles). Tell only one racist joke as you talk and only if you have nothing else to say rather than letting it be everything you say. Get what you need, but do the least amount of damage to yourself as you can, and always keep searching for something else that can give you what you need in a healthier fashion than what you’ve currently got.