Habits Die Hard

As a kid, I often wondered why some of our family friends and relatives, especially from villages, observed so many rituals. To me, at that time, they seemed boring and meaningless. Little did I realize that many of the rituals they performed developed into life-time habits – like a daily bath in cold water, prayers, physical work, eating fresh vegetarian food and so on. When you form a habit of rising early, it stays. If you are used to drinking a hot cup of coffee early in the morning, the habit stays - I can vouch for this from my personal experience!

I learnt over time that we are all creatures of habit and if you make good habits, good habits will make you. This wisdom has been around since ancient times. Aristotle once said, "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit."

Habits begin early and get ingrained in the mind. They can be friends or foes. Good habits can make our lives easier. But then, bad habits are easy to catch on, especially from parents, friends, or peers. Smoking, chewing paan or tobacco, alcoholism are some examples.  

Here's the point: Habits—good or bad—are often difficult to break ... they Die Hard!

Whether a habit plays a positive force in our lives or becomes an obstacle to the goals we want to achieve, it becomes ingrained through repeated actions.

How to break bad habits? The secret is to replace them with habits that are constructive.

As creatures of habit, we often struggle with breaking bad habits. To win—to break self-defeating attitudes and behaviors—we must understand that we have the power to choose and the power to change. We have the power to let go of negative thinking and adopt the mindset of a champion.

I believe that the subconscious mind is a lot more powerful than the conscious mind.  For example, while driving a car and carrying on a conversation with someone beside you or over cellphone, the conscious mind is attending to what is being talked while the subconscious mind is turning on the turn signal, hitting the brakes, attending to oncoming traffic,  watching the rear and side mirrors, regulating our breathing, planning our next move and on and on. The subconscious mind is so vast and so powerful that we do not even know what it is thinking or capable of. It truly runs our lives—whether we believe it or not! I think many of our ancient rituals were designed to help us strengthen the subconscious mind and control the conscious mind from straying into the field of undesirable habits.

Habits die hard but you can still change habits through mind-power. It is never too late!