Have you noticed any particular patterns that you tend to do regularly which eventually tends to occur subconsciously? No? Let me rephrase. Have you noticed your HABITS? Sounds familiar now right? If you read my first question carefully, it says – “.. eventually tends to OCCUR subconsciously” in it. This is the interesting part about a habit. You do not know you are doing it since you need not engage in self-analysis when you are doing it. For example, drinking coffee or smoking a cigarette the moment you wake up.

Lets talk about bad habits and on how to over come those. A bad habit is negative pattern that you keep doing. Some examples would be procrastination, biting your nails, etc. A bad habit is not an addiction unless the person looses control over his behavior. There are many ways to overcome a bad habit or any habit for that instance. Some ways include – behviour modification techniques, habit reversing techniques, etc. These techniques involve detail analysis of the behavior and treating them accordingly.

There is a natural way to treat them too. using your EMOTIONS. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar says that our habits can be dealt with Love, Greed and Fear.

Love

When a loved one comes and asks you to refrain from sometime, we easily control the behavior for their sake. A promise to a loved one has got great powers! This is one of the easiest way and smooth way of controlling a habit.

Greed

Sri Sri says that if you are offered a million dollars to stop doing something, you would put your best efforts to stop it to get the million dollars. So greed can help us in this way.

Fear

This technique has been used from the ancient days to alter and change our habits. Instilling fear in kids to make them do something or stop them from doing something. It is the same with adults.

A different approach to tackling habits is by taking a time bound vow. This is called as Samyama in Sanskrit. Sri Sri says that taking the vows according to time and place is important. For example, suppose someone has a habit of smoking cigarettes and says, “I will quit smoking,” but cannot do it. They can take a vow, three months or 90 days; a time-bound vow. If someone is used to cursing and swearing, take a vow not to use bad language for ten days. Don’t take it for a lifetime; you will break it immediately. If you happen to break it in between, don’t worry. Just begin again. Slowly increase the duration until it becomes your nature.

Habits will clog you when there is no liveliness or juice in life. When there is a direction for life force, you can rise above habits through Samyama. – Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

So lets take on our bad habits, list them down and start doing our samyama :))