We all have habits that don't serve us. It is the primary reason why our lives do not happen exactly the way we want them to. We say and do things on a regular basis that are contrary to what we "want". The energy and focus that should go into carefully crafting our lives with laser focus gets shifted to other things. And then many things that should be opportunities for us seem to become impossible obstacles.
But what can you do about it? It is just human nature, right? I mean, everybody has bad habits. There are things like smoking, overeating, swearing like a sailor, drinking too much, not listening to others, and overspending our budget (if we even have a budget) just to name a few. There are nearly as many different bad habits as there are people to explore them.
Often, our habits and not our desires are what run our lives. Without these things our lives would take a very different course. But, again, what can you do about it? Nearly all of us have struggled and failed to break a habit at some point. Why? What makes it so hard? Shouldn't it be just as simple as identifying behavior that we don't like and then acting differently?
Perhaps it should, but things don't work that way. It is simple psychology. When we are told we can't have a thing, our minds rebel and decide to want that thing more fervently than ever. This happens even if it was a thing we had only marginal interest in before. Our subconscious minds do not understand or accept the concept of not or don't. When we tell ourselves not to do a thing, as much as we'd like it to be different, we are telling ourselves to do that thing.
Also, nature abhors a vacuum. You can't just take something away and expect things to be fine. Are we doomed then to forever be surrounded by our bad habits? Not hardly. For the answer I turn to a lesson I learned in high school about genetics.
Within a few generations it is possible to completely breed out traits that one finds undesirable. It is a little more complicated than what I am about to present but here are the basics. Let's say that you want all future children from a specific gene pool to have light hair.
You start with person A who has had dark haired children in their family for many generations. Then there is person B whose lineage is all light haired people. In genetics, different traits, such as hair color are called alleles. When creating new life, traits are passed in pairs, sometimes one from the mother and one from the father and sometimes both from one parent. Each parent has a pair of traits passed from their parents before them.
We know that dark hair is a dominant trait and light hair is a recessive trait. So we will say the person with dark hair has their traits represented by the letters TT and the light haired person has their traits represented by the letters tt. From these two parents we have four possible combinations for this particular trait. TT, Tt, tT and tt. Suppose that the child of these two parents inherits only the dominant trait. They would be represented by TT. Now suppose they inherited only the recessive. Then their hair color would be represented by tt. The remaining two are what is called dominant recessive since they have the genetic material from both parents. In most cases the dominant recessive trait ends up being expressed as the dominant trait, in this case dark hair. So our initial parents would have a 75 percent chance of children with dark hair and a 25 percent chance of children with light hair.
Any light haired children from this pairing would be showing the tt or recessive trait. Assuming we were to run this experiment with a large group of people we could pair up the children(once they grew up of course) with the recessive traits with others that had the dominant recessive traits. Then our grouping would look something like this. Initial pairings. Tt, tt. Possible combinations that their children would have are, Tt,Tt,tt,tt. With this grouping you end up with a 50 percent chance of either light or dark hair and even any children with dark hair would still be dominant recessives.
At this point it is possible to take those second generation recessives, people who have light hair and had at least one parent with light hair and breed them with other second generation recessives and be nearly one hundred percent likely to end up with light haired offspring. The alleles tt and tt only allow for the recessive trait in future generations.
Now what does this mean for our bad habits? We can't just eliminate them. Our bad habits are dominant traits. When we try to etch them out of our lives we just ingrain them further and further, unless we introduce something new. You really can't just stop smoking. You have to start something, to fill the void left by the lack of the bad habit.
The good habit becomes our "recessive" trait, something that at first we might not do if we don't force ourselves to. But over time that dominant trait begins to give way and then our inclination is towards the dominant recessive. When we focus on it we can make the recessive show through, but left to our own devices the dominant will shine. Eventually, if we work at it long enough, we breed out the dominant trait until all that is left is the recessive and then we have a new habit, a good one.
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