The life you have is a direct result of what you give your attention to. Think about it. You decided to stop smoking so you threw all the cigarettes away or you cut way back. This went well for a while, maybe a month, six months, whatever. But after a while you get stressed, your boss yells, your kid gets in trouble at school AGAIN...and you’re headed to the 7-eleven for another pack! What happened? You were doing so well. You even had a few days in there that lighting up never crossed your mind. But here you are once again, shamefully giving up for the 500th time and telling yourself what a quitter you are. What happened is that you stopped one habit and failed to fill the void left by something that had been so important to you for so many years. I don’t mean some spiritual void or some vague psychological void that exists within you. I mean you failed to create another habit that supported the new you.

Human beings are pretty terrible at stopping things. As I have written previously, our lives are simply habits supporting what we believe about ourselves. Somewhere along the line you figured out that cigarettes are a great stress reliever and that you “need” to smoke when you are stressed. This became the belief “I am a smoker”, or some version of that. When you stopped smoking, you were still a smoker. You did nothing to prove that belief wrong. Had you implemented an activity that proved, “I am a fitness junkie”, or “I am a stress reduction expert”, by replacing the old habit of smoking with the habit of fitness or learning and mastering a different stress reduction technique, you would no longer identify as a smoker.

Stop trying to stop a habit and decide to start a new one that supports the life you want.

We love our habits regardless of how destructive they are because they support what we believe about ourselves. They also support our psychological needs. I have written about them elsewhere so I will give a general overview here. The needs are: significance, connection/love, certainty, uncertainty/variety, growth, and contribution.

I believe that everything we do, good and bad, is to support these needs. Think of it this way: If you come to me because you struggle with a particular habit, we will determine that you engage in this habit because of a belief or a story that you continually tell yourself. That belief or story may be, “I’m not important”, or “I’m not smart enough”. You are going to support these beliefs through your actions in order to meet at least some of the psychological needs listed above. If I believe, “I’m not smart enough”, it is difficult to meet my need for growth. It may also be tough to meet my needs for connection and significance if I believe that not being smart enough will result in people not liking me. But you still have these needs. As a result of not being able to meet these needs in a healthy manner, you may begin to create problems somewhere in life. Big enough problems create connection and significance. Gang members are gang members, not because they are horrible people but because membership in a gang fills the need for significance and it allows them to connect with people in the gang.

If you eliminate an unhealthy habit that was meeting your psychological needs and supporting your limiting belief but you don’t replace it with a healthy alternative, You are left with unmet needs and will inevitably fall back into the old habit as a way to meet your needs. Replacing an unhealthy habit with a healthy habit meets our unmet needs and begins to rewrite the story we have been telling ourselves.