All Bad Habits Are Attempts to Manage Your Emotions

Do you have a bad habit that you wish you could kick? Maybe you smoke, drink, eat, gamble, or self-gratify too much? What is causing that, and what can you do about it?

Before explaining the causes and what you can do, I have to preface this post with the fact that there are dozens and dozens of techniques to eliminate bad habits. Professionals might recommend anything from hypnosis, meditation, medication, and therapy to exercise, fresh air, socializing, and drinking more water. This post is not meant to prescribe anything but rather to explain what causes a bad habit and the ways in which these methods may help according to the people who would prescribe them.

So, what causes a bad habit? Well, as the title of this post states, behind all bad habits are an attempt to hack your emotional state. As a reminder (I’ve covered this many times over the years), there is a simple formula to understanding your emotional state: emotions = desire + belief + experience. What that means is that you either have an experience by choice or by chance, which causes an emotional response—in psychology, they call this stimulus->response. But your emotional response is not operating in a vacuum because your perception of reality affects how you respond, and the primary components here are your beliefs and desires regarding that experience. For example, if you receive a phone call from a friend one day and you are not on speaking terms because he keeps asking you for money, you would not feel good because you don’t want to talk to them and believe that they are calling to borrow money. Therefore, you’re not happy. But if it turns out that they were calling to apologize because they’re going to get help and they were paying you back today, you would be happy to receive the call. So the phone call itself can’t cause that response to change; it’s also your desires and beliefs influencing how you interpret that experience.

What a bad habit is doing is that you have found an activity (experience) that makes you feel good and, therefore, when you are having a negative experience that causes a negative emotion, you seek to change that negative emotion into a positive one by seeking that desirable experience that you believe will alleviate that negative emotion. There are many examples of this:

• If you eat too much, often times the desire to overeat is triggered by a stressful life event.
• If you smoke, often times it starts to enhance a social experience like a party but then later gets used during a stressful day to take 5 minutes for a nicotine high that will numb the pain a little.
• If you self-gratify, it’s taking a natural sex drive and using the neurochemical release of the orgasm to alleviate feelings of boredom or listlessness.
• If you bite your nails, it’s a reaction to nervousness or stressful situations where keeping yourself busy is a means to feel control and distract yourself from the situation.
• If you gamble, it could be that the thrill and the high of betting it all and possibly getting a big payday is an escape from the monotony or dreariness of your daily life.

So, as you can see, bad habits form as “self-medication” of sorts to “cure” the illness of negative emotions. Some of it is directly due to the pleasurable experience that addictive behaviors bring, but as any addict discovers, the body develops a tolerance to the activity and so it becomes more about the habit being a familiar, repeatable means by which you self-soothe. This is why it’s very difficult to quit a habit cold-turkey—in fact, there’s a famous quotation, “You can’t eliminate a habit; you can only replace it.” Because your habits are means through which you attain desired emotional outcomes, you can only find other ways to attain positive emotional states or you will inevitably go back to the “old faithful” habit that might be controlling your life but never let you down from giving you the temporary reprieve from your undesirable emotions that you were looking for.

So, now that you understand why you have those habits, how do you eliminate them? That’s where the recommendations that I listed earlier come in. There are a multitude of options, all of which have a reason for why they’re prescribed that I’ll explain below:

• Hypnosis – Hypnosis is a method by which practitioners bypass the conscious mind to get at your unconscious mind’s beliefs and try to change them. Sometimes, it’s simply changing your belief that the habit makes you feel good, as you may have seen when someone gets hypnotized into associating smoking with disgust and, therefore, immediately quitting. But, in other cases, it can be about helping you care about yourself or alleviate negative emotions about a past trauma that were causing you to feel bad, which led you to reach for the habit.
  
• Meditation – Meditation is a way to quiet your mind, thus reducing negative emotions. It does this by clearing out experience, desires, and beliefs, returning you to a neutral emotional state. If you seek meditation to reduce negative emotions, you have now replaced a negative habit like smoking with a positive one like meditation.
• Medication – Medication is a more direct means of eliminating bad habits. It works in a couple of primary ways: eliminating the craving that causes a habit (note: famous books like The Power of Habit and Atomic Habits explain the cue->craving->response->reward model in more detail) or helping you to satiate the craving in a different way than performing the habit. An example of the former is something like Ozempic that causes you to not want to eat as much, while an example of the latter is something like a nicotine patch to eliminate a smoking habit.
• Therapy – Therapy is a process by which people with past trauma can work through their emotions to reduce their negative impact, which can reduce the triggers that cause someone to perform a bad habit. It eliminates the habit by eliminating the need for the habit in the first place. If you drink when you think about your family member who committed suicide, for example, then coming to terms with that event will eliminate the emotional trigger that causes the habit.
• Exercise, Fresh Air, Socializing, and Drinking More Water – I’m combining these because they all have a similar reason for working: they are providing a beneficial experience for your body that can improve your emotional state in a healthy way. Exercise releases endorphins and can improve your health, thus making you feel better and not need the alternative means to feel better. Often times, people smoke cigarettes for the five-minute break, the few minutes outside (ironically, for fresh air), or the social element. As such, instead of using the smoking as an excuse to do those other things, simply do those other things and get the benefit you were looking for. Finally, the drinking more water is an example of how a drug like caffeine can become addictive: you didn’t get enough sleep and you need water, so coffee comes in and addresses both issues. But if you had simply slept more and drank water, you would’ve been fine.

There are many more techniques, of course, but this isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list. The idea is to help you understand your bad habit and put it in context of why you’re doing it and, therefore, what you can do to eliminate it. Most people think that a habit is caused by doing an activity that is pleasurable and wanting to repeat it as much as possible, and there is some truth to that—however, if you were perfectly happy to begin with, you may not have needed the habit. So, most habits can be replaced with other habits that fill the void you’re looking to fill, and only a small fraction are biological in nature where you literally can’t help yourself because you are genetically predisposed to becoming addicted to the activity or substance. This is good news because you’re more in control of your life when you know what’s causing your behavior. Instead of saying, “Well, that’s just how I am, and there’s nothing I can do about it,” which can cause you to feel helpless and never change your behavior—even if it kills you—you can instead say, “It’s just the pain of that past trauma (or stress of the current situation) talking, and I need to find out how to cope in ways that aren’t destructive,” so that you can change your behavior and maintain control over your behavior.

While this is all much easier explained than executed upon, understanding the reason for your bad habit(s) is the first step to changing your behavior to something more positive for your life. Hopefully, if you are facing a bad habit that you’re looking to kick, this information can help you take the first step toward understanding it root cause and addressing it.