Quit the habit of quitting

Are you trying to quit something for good? Don’t try to quit, instead try to do

It’s great when you realise that you are on autopilot and that it isn’t acceptable anymore. So, what you do is get pumped up and take charge of the situation by telling yourself that you have to quit something to be able to live a better/richer life. Usually, it is a bad habit or a bad experience that is so ingrained in you that it seems impossible to get rid of it.

Globally, people subtract things from their lives to better their lives because, in this day and age, abundance is a primal killer and a cause of some of the most chronic health/mental problems.

For instance, most smokers I’ve met have tried to quit smoking more than a hundred times, which in a way proves that smokers get the motivation every now and then, but then the motivation isn’t sustainable to help them kick the habit.

Similarly, one out of every three guys seem to have got caught in the wrong job, so they continuously plan to quit their job but are still doing the same job 10 years later.

According to certain spiritual leaders and experimenters who have changed the course of their lives multiple times, it is not easy to quit something and sometimes quitting isn’t even an option because after you’ve done something for a few years, it is embossed in your lifestyle and it stays in your life in one form or the other even if you try to quit it.

One cannot quit any bad thing in life; one can only replace it with a good thing. Do not worry, they did not just find out what doesn’t work, they crafted the easiest way to what truly does. So, you can fully quit something for good and enjoy the process too.

The magic formula is to not try to quit a bad habit/experience from your life, instead, take up something completely new that will keep you so very engaged. And then, unconsciously, the old habit/experience will get side-tracked, and for all practical purposes, completely erased from your life.

Quit the old habit by taking up a new habit

Now, before you think anything funny, don’t push yourself from smoking to drinking or from carelessness to anxiety. The idea obviously isn’t about “to quit something bad, you need to take up something as bad” because if it were, it would be the stupidest idea ever.

So, what this means is, if you have to really quit something bad, you have to:

1. Define what you want to subtract from your life
2. Identify the triggers leading you to the bad habit/experience
3. Identify what fuels these triggers
4. Take up something extremely interesting to completely avoid these triggers

You can take the same structured approach and fail if you don’t execute the last step perfectly. The real juice in your success is in your finalising on and doing that one activity (that one new habit) which is so much more engaging that you don’t have a chance to expose yourself to the triggers that caused the bad habit/experience.

Good luck quitting your bad habits. Lastly, what an irony? motivational speeches keep telling us “Don’t Quit”, however for a spiritual being, life is about being successful at quitting things that don’t serve us well.

By: Girish Mahadevan