365. Bad Habits

A habit can form quietly and easily get out of hand. I’m acting in a way that I know I shouldn’t, but it seems to happen without choice. I know I can’t go on like this. I can’t keep harming myself by allowing the habitual behaviour to continue. I’ve already decided to stop, but despite my efforts to control myself, there is no change.

I’m trying to hold myself to my decision, and I’m frustrated by my inability to take control. I desperately want to prevent the habit from continuing. I feel like I should be able to do this just by imposing control over my actions. But this doesn’t work because my habit is already a form of control.

I haven’t noticed this because I’ve associated control with conscious choice, but not every instance of control follows from choice. Attempts at control are often reactions to the many kinds of suffering that arise from attachment. It’s because I’m suffering that my actions are repeating in this narrow and specific direction. My bad habit arose as a reaction to anxiety: it is the action I take to try to control that anxiety.

But suffering cannot be overcome through control. My habit will never leave me if I just keep trying to force myself to stop. Instead, I need to become looser and more free than I already am. I need to allow my attention to fully explore my habit and its causes. When I’m able to see the anxiety that provokes the habitual behaviour, then I will also begin to see the precursors of that suffering.

Without investigating my habit as a reaction to suffering, I won’t be able to resolve it at the root, which is attachment itself. It is only by seeing the nature of my habit and the attachment that causes it — not just intellectually, but in my actual experience — that I can hope to free myself from it. Once the attachment is loosened, the anxiety that follows from it will depart, and so will the habit that was merely a reaction to that suffering.