[quote]Elegua360 wrote:
[quote]Cortes wrote:
For habits that are not strongly connected to a dopamine response (unfortunately both of yours appear to be), I have found that the best way, for me, to completely rid myself of a habit is to NOT quit it. What I do is WRITE DOWN my conviction first to just keep away from the object of my desire for 30 days. Recently I had a terrible addition to Red Bull. Before that Diet Coke. In both cases, I wrote something to the effect of: I will drink only water or juice for the next 30 days. (You should write in the positive, not the negative, so don’t write: I will NOT dip for the next 30 days).
As far as dopamine related addictions, the solution is not always so easy, but, again, it requires first visualizing yourself as someone who would NEVER indulge in such habits.
There are a couple of very, very good threads here about quitting internet porn. I highly recommend you read them. [/quote]
Hey, this is actually in response to pretty much everything you wrote on this theme in this thread…I’ve had my own addiction issues, but I only managed to overcome them with a slightly different form of self-programming.
See, I was always given advice like what you said – and mind you, I am NOT saying you’re wrong because I’ve seen your basic advice work with plenty of other people – but for me, it never sunk. The more I hated the addiction, the more I told myself ‘never again,’ the more it became an obsession in my head.
The only trick that worked for me (which was slipped into my subconscious using a variety of techniques) was to convince myself that I didn’t actually NEED to stop indulging. In fact, my programming was that I could do it whenever I felt like it, I just don’t feel like it right now.
The advantage of this programming was that on the few times that I did relapse, I only indulged my obsession once. Back when I had the ‘NO NEVER AGAIN’ programming, when I relapsed, I’d pile on the guilt and get the, “Oh f— it, let’s just binge out” mindset.
Once I changed my focus to the ‘no big deal’ mindset, the relapses never turned into binges, and I generally only had two or three brief self-indulgent moments that never got messy.
And I’m not sure I want to get into the exact types of addictions at the moment, but I think they were serious.
Have you ever encountered something like that, or someone who used such a technique?
I just bring it up because maybe, it’s the type of addiction-fighting mindset that would work with certain personality types. I don’t know, maybe I’m just a really weird case, but I’d appreciate your impressions (or anyone else’s, for that matter).[/quote]
I totally agree with this, as far as certain habits/addictions/obsessions are involved. I have certainly found your point about the Relapse=>Ohfuckit=>worse than ever before set of actions to be the case.
Indeed the “I’ll never do it again” approach is, I think, very seldom successful in any case. Every hard addiction of mine that I overcame was more of a virtually overnight deep subconscious level transformation. Every habit I’ve give up involved the no-big-deal approach you and I both describe above.
