How to mask a bad habit

Image by Henryk Niestrój from Pixabay

A couple of years ago, when I was living in the city, I used to ride the bus to work. My destination was one station beyond the city´s primary bus station - Vasaplan. When the bus arrived at Vasaplan, the driver turned off the engine and waited for a couple of minutes before continuing the route. Sometimes, there were people talking with each other or on their phones, but you could usually never hear them in the noisy bus. But as soon as the engine sound vanished, the environment got quiet and you could instantly hear every word in the nearby conversation. And as soon as the bus continued its route, the background noise came back and consequently the conversation became inaudible. This is a perfect example of a phenomenon called “sound masking”.

Last Sunday at the sermon, the theme of the day was evil. I really apricated that the priest emphasized that evil resides within all of us. It was a new take on a familiar topic to me, although I don’t think anyone has ever said it better than Solzhenitsyn “But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being”. This is liberating words to me. Because if evil comes from within, I can do something about it. If it were external however, I would become a victim.

I have thought a lot about my bad habits, of which there are plenty. And I am not alone. Everybody faces this struggle, to varying degrees. A bad habit is something that you know you shouldn’t do, that you’re worse off after you’ve done it, and then still, you do it anyway. It is like mind control, a machine or obsession that takes over my body. If you think about it, you can probably come up with three things that you know you should remove from your life right now. But you haven’t, for some reason. This brings us back to the introductory topic of sound masking.

Just like the noise from the bus engine masked the conversations among the passengers, bad habits can be masked by even worse habits. It is like a bad habit is a sub-routine of some greater problem in my life. And if I don’t fix that first, it becomes near impossibly to do something about the smaller problem. I believe that you can rank-order your bad habits. And that you probably should sort out the worst one first. I know, it sounds ridiculously obvious... But the true eye-opener for me was when I gave up alcohol about four years ago. Alcohol is a drug that strongly affects your judgement. When I got the drug completely out from my system – which probably can take a couple of months I guess – I consequently have ended up with what I perceive to be a significantly improved judgement. I am now convinced that alcohol was my worst habit, and that it masked my other bad habits to the degree that I didn’t really notice them. With the alcohol gone, other things have now risen to the surface. Even if I knew about them before, and considered them bad, I now see them in a different light and realize how damaging they truly are to me. I am now in the process of rank-ordering my remaining bad habits, and eliminating them one by one. Of course, there is an infinite number of bad habits in my life, so I will never claim that I am “done”. But as I said, they can be rank-ordered, and if you rank them correctly and keep eliminating them, it is physically impossible that your life will not improve as a result.

I am also aware that if I ever engage in an “eliminated” habit, chances are that it will come back with a vengeance. I honestly don’t think I can control them. I think the only solution for me is to replace them with other habits. The energy within me is like a pressure cooker and cannot be contained. It will come out one way or the other. And it is infinitely easier to send that energy into the direction of a previously established bad habit. Sometimes when I get that feeling nowadays, I can grab my clothes even in the middle of the night and just go out for a walk and keep walking until I am so tired that I fall asleep from exhaustion. That is a safe and bullet proof method. I simply burn the excess energy away. I have never returned from a walk feeling worse than when I left. Always better. And that’s the number one reason why dogs are wonderful, by the way. Because you will do a lot of walking. Every. Single. Day.

I have been having internal debates whether I could have a glass again, but I am unable to justify it. And for each year that passes, it becomes more difficult to open the bottle again. I am now coming to similar conclusions for other bad habits of mine. That the only solution for me is to get rid of them in my life completely and forever. If you think that sounds too harsh and that you indeed have the self-control to handle a glass of alcohol once in a while (or some other “bad habit”), then more power to you. It’s none of my business. However, I know that I don’t.

How do you end up in Hell? One infinitesimal step at a time. That’s how you get to Heaven also, by the way, but a crucial difference is that you have the wind in your back when you’re on the path to Hell but you are swimming against the current when heading for Heaven. After all, it is easier to eat ice cream and watch TV than to go for a run in the rain. Now extrapolate ten years. A bit of friction it seems, can act as your compass needle. Does this mean that I can never eat ice cream and watch TV? Maybe, but that’s probably not realistic. But perhaps if I build enough momentum in the right direction, an ice cream here and there wouldn’t even make a dent. That’s probably the trick. And with regards to alcohol, my momentum isn’t even close and it might never be. But I do have an ice cream occasionally and it’s rare enough that I don’t think it will bring me to Hell anytime soon. Honestly, if eating ice cream is at the pinnacle of my ranking list of bad habits, that sounds like pretty close to Heaven…

Let’s do something about those greater problems first, shall we?