“The secret to permanently breaking any bad habit is to love something greater than the habit.”
Bryant McGill
After you’ve become aware of your Observing Ego and have achieved a certain degree of objectivity towards yourself, you’re more capable of realistically determining what is healthy and good in your life and what isn’t.
It’s much clearer to you now which traits you need to improve, which relationships to restructure, and which habits to change.
At this point, you need to have enough motivation to do all of that, which is the next step you need to take towards achieving a healthy mindset.
Different things motivate different people, so you need to figure out what motivates you to transform things that you’ve found unhealthy in your life.
Let’s assume you’re a smoker. Although it’s clear that smoking damages your health, you still enjoy smoking. Unless you find some other habit that will be at least as enjoyable as smoking, you’ll likely never quit cigarettes.
What is an example of a healthy habit that may replace an unhealthy one?
It can be a sport you used to enjoy but now neglect because cigarettes and sports don’t go well together.
In the beginning, it’s difficult for you to return to your favorite sport. You become aware of the negative consequences of smoking on your health because you get tired quickly.
As you progress in sport, smoking is less and less pleasing because your body cleanses faster from the poison from cigarettes. You also notice that you get more tired doing physical activities when you smoke, so you take larger breaks between two cigarettes.
Then, you notice positive changes in your body when you don’t smoke.
Of course, you may return to smoking intensively again when you’re in good company, or at a party, or in times of stress. But the next day, you won’t feel so good due to the cigarettes you smoked the evening before. Thus in the days to come smoking will become less frequent.
In the meantime, you get used to healthier life habits, you’re proud of your slim waist and your physical strength, your endurance is higher, and you want to preserve those newly acquired qualities.
It’s important to know that if you want to get rid of some unhealthy habit or get out of a problematic relationship, the most challenging thing is to break up with them because you’re used to them.
You’ll endure a psychological crisis after just cutting them off. Most people can’t stand the crisis and quickly return to old and harmful habits.
It’s much easier to replace your harmful habits or outdated relationships with some other, better and healthier habits or people. In such a way, there won’t be emptiness where a damaging habit or relationship once were.
Still, that space will be filled with something new that gives you a healthier kind of pleasure, so the crisis caused by losing of an old habit or relationship will be much smaller.
Remember that almost everything we do in life is a matter of habit and that one habit is most easily changed by another.
You have to endure the transition period until you get used to the new routine.
Recognizing Self-Saboteurs and Mastering Them is the next challenge you need to overcome in achieving a healthy mindset.