Like most people, I am prone to developing filthy habits. Habit is an interesting concept, when you really stop to think about it. What is a habit? How do you break bad habits? How can you stop being weak-minded?
What is a habit?
“A habit, from the standpoint of psychology, is a more or less fixed way of thinking, willing, or feeling acquired through previous repetition of a mental experience,” says the American Psychological Association. Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, “Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.” Billionaire investor and everyone’s favorite uncle noted, “Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”
Watching online pornography is a bad habit that can be broken.
I developed the habit of watching online pornography. This habit took me years to develop and has probably cost me over a year of my life. (There are 8,760 hours in a year. If your porn habit costs you an hour a day, how quickly does the time add up?)
I decided to stop watching pornography. Breaking the habit was relatively easy for me, because of my Bad Habit Breaking Matrix. Using the Bad Habit Breaking Matrix will help you break all of your bad habits. Let’s talk about how it works.
The Bad Habit Breaking Matrix.
Behind every action – and a bad habit is simply an action that has negative consequences – is a why. You drink because you’re thirsty. You eat because you’re hungry. You piss because your bladder is full. There is always a why.
Identify the why behind the habit.
Sometimes the why is not always obvious. Consider pornography as an example.
Although pornography sexually arouses me, I don’t want to watch porn when I’m horny. The why behind my porn habit is not, “I am horny and need a release.”
If I were already horny before watching porn, I could masturbate like we did in the good old days – you’d just close your eyes and think of a girl you had been with or a girl you wanted to be with and then handle your business. It’d take less than 5 minutes between finding the right visual and achieving climax.
With porn, I’d sit on front of a computer for hours sometimes, looking for the just-right clip. The casting couch clip wouldn’t work because her toes looked funny. Oh, that doggy style clip is nice but too short. Let’s find an anal clip where the girl is in pain. No, she’s in too much pain. We need to find an innocent girl who is in enough pain that the scene is interesting but not so much pain that it looks like her soul is being sucked out of her body.
Too hot, too cold, too hard, too soft. I was afraid of cold showers. I needed it just right, like a modern day male Goldilocks.
To overcome my filthy habit of watching hundreds of clips of porn a week, I identified the cause of my habit and applied the Bad Habit Breaking Matrix. You can do this for any of your bad habits. Here’s how it works.
1. Start a journal.
2. When you want to engage in your bad habit, write, “I want to [insert bad habit] when [state your reason – the why behind what you want to do].
3. Write down what’s going on in your life at the moment you feel the way you feel. This will help you discover the why behind your bad habit.
4. Find a positive habit to replace the negative habit, because it’s far more effective to replace a bad habit with a good habit than to simply eliminate a bad habit. (Nature abhors a vacuum.)
Here is one of my journal entries:
I want to watch porn when I’m feeling bored and uncreative. It’s 9:55 a.m. The muse hasn’t struck me. I’m slightly groggy.
This means I don’t want to actually watch porn. I just want an escape from boredom.
(Note: I watched far less Internet porn when I had a dog. This is because I’d break my day up into several intervals. When I needed a break from work, I’d take the dog out to piss on a tree, or toss around some tennis balls, or walk around and let pretty girls stop to tell us how cute my dog was. Grinding away for a long time is not how I operate. I perform lots of short, intense intervals and then need rest. Like a lion. Roar.)
Solution/new habit: Take a nap, take a walk, read, work on an outline for a blog post.
Do you see what I did there? I wrote down that I wanted to watch porn. I got inside my own head to discover the reason to watch porn. Then I found a good habit to replace the bad habit.
Post a comment below.
What’s your bad habit? How can you apply the Bad Habit Breaking Matrix to replace your negative habit with positive ones?
Now check out: Two Ways to Become a Better Man.
