Breaking Old Patterns of Living

Breaking Old Patterns of Living

By Mr Ghaz, November 8, 2009

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Breaking Old Patterns of Living

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Many people use food, drink, cigarettes or pills to help them cope, in the short term, with stress and worry. But as long term measures they don’t really help you cope and they do damage your health. The stress itself may have been produced by personal problems. Perhaps it is social circumstances that make life difficult. But unfortunately it is much harder to improve housing and working conditions than it is to deal with personal worries.

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It is also difficult to change the kind of foods which are produced, advertised and sold in the shops. Our society certainly does not make changes your ways easy. Persuading you to drink more, eat more ‘junk’ food and smoke more is big business. The Government gets high revenue from the sales of tobacco and alcohol – even though a different government department then has to spend as much on providing treatment for tobacco and alcohol related illness.

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Large profits are made by the sale of junk food (which have little goodness in them), white flour and refined sugar. These factors all make it difficult, particularly for people on a low income, to eat well and keep their weight down.

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Of course not all poor patterns of living are ways of trying to cope with problems. They may have been picked up – without thinking about them – when you were a child. Or, if they were learnt as a way of coping, the original stress may have gone but the pattern remains as a habit. So far we have avoided calling these patterns habits. This is because most people think of habits as bad and that the person who has the habit should take the blame for what he does. Habits may be “bad” in that they are damaging and difficult to change – but that may be nothing to do with the character of the person concerned. When people do want to change they have the problem that, whatever the reasons were for starting in the first place, habits, once learnt, are extremely difficult to break.

Learning New Patterns

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Most people know what they want to change – or feel they ought to change. They also know why they want to change. They also know why they want to change. The damage caused by smoking, drinking or eating too much is well known.

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What holds people back? They don’t believe they can change, and to admit it may be too painful, because it makes them seem weak-willed. So they may swing the other way and maintain they don’t want to change.

Have You Decided that You Do Want to Change?

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You may have decided to try to change even though you cannot do much, at the moment, about your underlying problems. Or perhaps you want to ‘break the habit’ whilst also tackling the underlying problem? Or you may no longer have any problems but realize you are still left with a ‘bad’ habit!

You Can Change

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It will need careful planning and you may need the help of your family or friends or workmates. But it would be foolish of us to tell you that it is easy. Those of you for whom it is easy will already have got on and made the changes. But many of us have tried and failed in the past. We know it isn’t easy and our confidence has been damaged by the failure. But that was probably because we did not make a good enough plan.

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You can succeed and once you start to succeed you have the extra reward and satisfaction of knowing you can control what you do and what happens to you.