Exercises - Habits

Someone asks the question:

(What is meant by habit?  Acting as though then were now?)

Habit is a decision.  Once you have made a decision that this is necessary or this is it, then you might say this is a habit.  Once you have decided what is “good” to you, you automatically respond to get it. 

A habit is another word for saying an unconscious motivation, and this is why we talk about doing things consciously because then they’re not done habitually or mechanically, they are done consciously, right?  There’s nothing incorrect about the habit so we like to be conscious about it. 

So if a person has some habit that they would like to break—this is well to bring up because people will come in to talk with you, and they have a habit of biting their nails or they have a habit of stuffing sweets, or any number of behaviors. 

So if you have the person to consciously do these things whether it is suck their thumb or nibble their fingernails, or whatever thing they do, they consciously do it several times—not just one now—but they begin to do this act quite consciously. 

Now whatever it may be—even if it’s drink a bottle of booze.  Now they sit down and they drink it consciously aware of what they’re doing.  We tried this one time and the dialog went something like this:

“Now when I drink this I become wiser, I have a much greater personality.”
“I can do all sorts of things I can’t do otherwise.” 

So he told himself what he was doing it for.  He was sipping away on the booze, and he was an alcoholic.  Pretty soon he said, “That’s a bunch of foolishness, I’m gonna put the bottle away.”  He hasn’t touched it since.

(You worked with my daughter….?........)

But we started out to deliberately bite the fingernails, not to resist biting them.  You see, most things we start on -- it is always to resist them.  Try to quit it, try to control it; and by doing that, we only increase the conflict. 

So if you want to quit jerkin’ your tie, why you deliberately jerk your tie a number of times every day.  Every few minutes you jerk your tie twice. 

So if you should be interested, that’s one way you can go about it.