Habits versus New Life

The following question, which Hippocrates, who lived thousands of years ago, advised doctors to ask their patients, is very inspiring for those who really want to change their lives today:

“Are you ready to give up the things that make you sick?”

In other words, for example, you are constantly suffering from heart palpitations, are you ready to give up the large-sized coffees you drink three or four times a day, or your eyes are very tired and constantly burning; are you ready to reduce your screen time; your back hurts, are you ready to give up sitting all the time?

Let’s extend the scope of this question to a wider area than diseases and ask it again:

Our patterns of behaviour, which we call habits and which really determine how we live our lives, are sometimes so ingrained in our lives that we call them ‘my personality’.

For many of us, personality is seen as a phenomenon that is almost impossible to change.

However, no matter how old one is, both one’s personality and one’s habits can change; whether we call it personality or habit, it is very important that we can say “you are not with me” to all these patterns of behaviour when they distract us from being the person we want to be.

One of humanity’s greatest problems is that it thinks there is a Catholic marriage between its personality and its behaviour.

   Gabor Mate, considered one of the most important scientists of our time, describes human personality as “life strategies developed to be accepted and to survive in the family and social environment into which one is born”.

Over time, these strategies become our habits and begin to dominate us.

And of course what we see and experience in the family home where we open our eyes, from eating habits to behaviour patterns, is also included in the organisation we call personality.

So if we go back to the words of Hippocrates:

-Are we prepared to give up the things that make us ill?

The way we love, the way we work, our self-care habits, our core beliefs, our emotional reflexes, our reactions to unexpected events can make us sick.

And these things that make us sick we can call our ‘personality’.

Life sometimes brings us to a crossroads where we have to choose between our personality and our health.

Just as we have to stop smoking to protect our lungs, we may have to give up some of the most essential aspects of our personality in order to achieve the life we want.

Why would we want to share our lives with habits and personality traits that are not good for us and that harm us physically and psychologically?

Now let’s look at how we can change this order:

So what to do? How to do it?

We know that it is very difficult to give up or change a habit, even if it does not feel good. Because of the adaptive nature of our system, when a pattern of behaviour is repeated for a while, it becomes something that requires effort and patience to change.

Since our habits are very strong, instead of being stubborn about them, we can observe them in three stages:

What do we feel when we don’t do it?
How do we feel when we do them?
How do we feel afterwards?

Whether it is our behavioural habits or our self-care habits, these three questions are very valuable for us to understand the processes we go through with them.

• Before
• Sequence
• After

Especially the question “How do I feel afterwards?” will give us clear information about the “personality” of our habits. The answer is simple: I feel good or I don’t feel good. Either my energy goes down or my energy goes up. Our eating habits, in particular, immediately reveal the foods that are good for us and those that are not.

Physically, the fact that our stomach feels good, does not burn or hurt, and that we feel full for a long time, tells us a lot.

As our habits cause some physical or psychological dependencies in our body, it is quite normal to feel some discomfort and unease when we start to change them. Let’s accept from the beginning that we will feel a state of non-adaptation in this process. If we want to be well and our motivation in life is to feel well, we are not easily seduced by our habits. When we keep our attention on ourselves, when we stop living life on autopilot, we can clearly see how we experience the results of our behaviours and habits and what we feel.   

Isn’t that wonderful?