Why Good Habits Can Help Prevent Addictions
In most cases, an addition can be an incredibly difficult thing to break out of. When you realize what addictions can do to your body (especially when it comes to a substance such as alcohol) you’ll start to understand just how important it is to avoid getting addicted to anything. However, it’s not just things like alcohol and drugs that can cause a problem for us. The reality is that anything we do can turn into an addiction that causes a negative effect on our health if we take it too far.
In most cases, an addition can be an incredibly difficult thing to break out of. When you realize what addictions can do to your body (especially when it comes to a substance such as alcohol) you’ll start to understand just how important it is to avoid getting addicted to anything. However, it’s not just things like alcohol and drugs that can cause a problem for us. The reality is that anything we do can turn into an addiction that causes a negative effect on our health if we take it too far.
Imagine if someone had an addiction to work. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s actually a real mental health condition known as workaholism. Like any kind of addiction, work addiction means you simply can’t stop working regardless of the damage it does to your mental health or physical state. This sounds like a great addiction to have since it’ll make you a lot of money, but it’s not as good as it sounds. It could cause a loss of sleep, it could lead you to being obsessed with work-related things and it could result in paranoia regarding your work performance.
Luckily, there is a defence against these bad habits; good habits. In this post, we’re going to take a look at how building up good habits can counteract bad ones and also how to define what a good or bad habit even is.
The sources of any bad habit are boredom and stress
The two most likely culprits when it comes to developing an addiction are boredom and stress. If you’re constantly bored and have nothing to do, then it becomes easy to develop an addiction since you’ve got a lot of spare time to spend on it. For instance, someone that’s recently been made redundant is very likely to develop some kind of addiction. This is because they’re stressed from losing their job and a source of income, and they’ll also be bored because they no longer have a job to feel responsible for. This means they’re extremely likely to develop some kind of bad habit, and this will be amplified depending on the person’s situation.
So in order to avoid bad habits in the first place, it’s important to build up good habits that can counteract both of these concerns.
For starters, work on building up good habits that help combat stress. This could involve improving your concentration and also avoiding anything that triggers your stress. If meeting with certain people stresses you out, then it’s important to avoid those kinds of encounters. If playing online video games causes you to be frustrated, then it’s a good idea to try and lessen the amount you play. There are lots of stress triggers to be worried about and identifying them will be important when it comes to battling stress.
When it comes to boredom, this is something that will be completely up to you to change. Boredom affects everyone but there are plenty of ways to overcome it. The first thing we’d suggest is developing some kind of positive hobby that either teaches you a skill or improves your well-being. This could be going to the gym, it could be learning something like drawing or an instrument, and it could involve surrounding yourself with positive people. This will greatly reduce your chances of developing an addiction to something and will also help you network with people that can assist you should you become bored or stressed out.
Find the triggers that cause boredom or stress and then find ways around them. This is arguably the best way to prevent yourself from developing an addiction to something since it tackles the two main triggers.
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Surrounding yourself with positive people
Another good habit to develop is to surround yourself with positive people. This essential means avoiding anyone that could tempt you into developing a bad habit, such as introducing you back to alcoholism or even getting you to try some kind of drug at a party. Surrounding yourself with positive people is actually a strategy that a rehab centre would use to try and stop your addictions from growing worse. By being around positive people, you’ll have a support network that is willing to help you and support you in stopping your addictions from progressing. They’ll provide moral support and you’ll also have someone to speak to should things get bad.
When you make more friends with positive people, you’ll also feel more encouraged to build better habits. This can include things such as picking up sports that can be played with other people, going to the gym with a fitness partner or even learning a skill with someone. By surrounding yourself with others who are positive-minded and less likely to tempt you with an addiction, you can greatly reduce your chances of picking up a bad habit. Even if you were to succumb to an addiction, being around positive people will support you in your time of need and help convince you to break free from it.
Another reason to surround yourself with positive people is to always have others to look up to. By being around people that want to live similar lifestyles to you, you’re far less likely to even think about addictive substances or bad habits. This doesn’t mean forgetting your old friends and leaving them behind, but it does mean finding other friends that can help you develop more positive and productive habits.
Remember; you don’t break bad habits, you replace them
This is arguably the most important piece of information that you might gain from this article. Bad habits aren’t just broken–they need to be replaced with something else entirely or else they will keep coming back and affecting your life.
Think of it this way; we only have a finite number of hours in a day. If you dedicated two hours of your time to some kind of addiction or hanging around people that partake in those bad habits, then simply erasing those two hours isn’t going to work. It’s just going to create a void where you have two hours of boredom. It’s also difficult to just remove those people from your life since they’ll likely try to contact you and ask you why you’re not hanging out anymore.
So instead of just trying to remove the bad habit, it has to be replaced with something. Not only does the time need to be dedicated to something else, but the benefits that you got from the addiction also need to be replaced with something else that isn’t as harmful to your health. For example, if you spent a lot of time each week partying and consuming alcohol for fun, then you need to find something that gives you a similar feeling of fun without the negative health benefits attached to it.
It sounds a lot easier than it is, but it’s important to be more mindful about addictions and why people get drawn into them in the first place. Once you start to look at why you might get addicted to something in the first place, it becomes a lot easier to manage addictions and also avoid them. At the core of it, good habits and hobbies will greatly reduce your chances of becoming addicted to something.
We hope that this article has been useful in helping you understand the benefits of good habits and how they essentially counteract bad habits.