Why You Struggle With Bad Habits

“It is easier to prevent bad habits than to break them.” (Benjamin Franklin)

Photo by Manan Chhabra on Unsplash

We all have a good amount of experience when it comes to engaging in unhealthy habits. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either blatantly lying or just severely ignorant of what their unhealthy habits actually are.

Firstly though, I’d like to start off by talking about the moralization of habits and how that just adds more fuel to the fire of the momentum of these unhealthy habits.

The Moralization Of Habits

Let’s get this straight, habits are neither “good” nor “bad.” Habits are simply ways of acting that we have repeated over and over again until they have reached a point of unconscious repetition.

The very act of calling a habit “bad” just allows more of that given behavior for a few reasons:

Human beings are naturally rebellious

We usually don’t like when others are telling us that we’re engaging in a “bad” habit and because of this, we want to feel in control of our lives. As a result, we compensate to the other extreme and simply fall deeper into the trap of the “bad” habit.

When we’re told to stop eating junk food, we’ll eat more junk food.