Habits are often useful and good for us.

But what about the % of habits that spiral into addiction?

We need habits to keep most of our worlds going without large effort.

But what do we do with behaviour that is becoming addiction?

This is surprisingly common in today’s day and age. A lot of people are addicted to TV, addicted to their phones, addicted to coffee. Some addictions are more problematic than these.

How do you learn self-control around areas that are beyond your weekly goals?

For example- if you have a goal of spending within 1-2 hours on your phone every day, how do you practice anti-addiction methods to help you with this?

How do you learn self control?

Some self control methods are external- placing your phone away from where you can see it outside those two hours, and turning off post notifications. For overeating, this is one of the most helpful methods- avoiding having too much junk food in the house.

What about compulsive behaviour? You would have to set goals with it. And to figure out how to wait it out until urges have passed. How do you do this? It would be working with the unconscious parts of your mind to make sure your emotions are helping you with your goals as well. It would be distracting yourself. It would be to keep turning to your addiction goals- and then to keep turning to other goals to keep busy.

For example, with mobile phone leisure use, can your goal be to check your phone at certain times per day or week, and outside of these times to keep practicing the parts of your brain that says “check then, not now”. Can you get an idea of what your goals are with checking your phone, to try to meet these goals during your allocated times, and if you can’t, to keep practicing letting it go until the next time?

What about being addicted to being loved? This would be about meeting some kind of need or needs, wouldn’t it? It could be a symptom of high levels of boredom and a need for different, new goals in your life, probably emotionally connected goals. Is your love addiction likely to become something real? A lot of hormones are released when falling in love. So what are your goals around it? What are your goals before the hormones and after the hormones (e.g. to keep returning to your life goals). Also remember that this is a very regular part of life- the average person falls in love eight times before marriage. This is a very regular and normal part of what it means to be human, for the billions of people. You just need to learn how to keep returning to your list of goals, and to avoid things that trigger you in the wrong direction.

However, let’s make sure that we acknowledge the difference between love addiction and the other various types of addiction- they are different things.

Being addicted to someone’s social media messages could be either phone addiction, internet addiction or friend addiction (e.g. their unique social vitamins)… there are a variety of different kinds of addictive behaviours. Some are habits, which we need, which are often good.

Addictions are habits that are too far from what we want, from what is good.