One of my favorite quotes of all time is, “You cannot eliminate a habit; you can only replace it.” It’s a great insight around how to change your life, as most people try to quit things cold turkey only to fail when the triggers that cause them to do that habit come around. For example, if you started smoking or drinking during times of stress and try to stop, as soon as the stress comes back, you won’t have the willpower to resist. But replacing those habits with going to the gym, for example, and you get your stress out and trigger the endorphins that will make you feel better, thus making quitting easier. You don’t eliminate the habit, you replace it.
I would leverage that same structure for desires: you cannot eliminate a desire; you can only replace it. What does this new version mean? Well, there is a well-known part of Buddhism, mainly the Four Noble Truths, that states that everyone suffers because they want things that they cannot have and so if you eliminate the desire, you eliminate the suffering. Now, I personally take issue with how that might be misinterpreted because you can’t eliminate all desire or you wouldn’t be alive anymore. Instead, you should refocus on things that you want and appreciate to feel better vs. trying to effectively suppress your desire or detach from everything (though detachment is a good technique to calm your mood, I don’t personally recommend doing it with the purpose of trying to eliminate all wants). My favorite example of this is when a child starts crying and then see something they like and immediately change their mood on a dime to be smiling and laughing again. The idea here is that if you shift your focus from the thing that you don’t like/want to the thing that you do, you can (immediately) begin to see your mood change.
So there are two reasons for this blog post’s topic:
We covered the first reason above: it is healthier to focus primarily on positive or constructive things that get you what you want—shifting the focus from what you don’t want to what you do will go a long way toward your life satisfaction and sense of purpose. The second is about making the desires themselves more positive. In this case, we’re talking about how if someone has wronged you, you want them to be wronged. If your team gets beat in a competition, you want them other team to lose. At worst, these negative desires can manifest as wanting to hit someone for having an opinion you don’t like or being a certain way that you don’t like. While those desires are there for a reason, it is better for you (and the world) to create a way to keep those desires on the positive side.
So let’s talk about the origin of these unhealthy desires. What causes you to want to hurt others, hurt yourself, sabotage your relationships, or hold yourself back from success? Well, outside of sociopaths, most unhealthy desires are actually caused by negative beliefs. In effect, the negative belief corrupts a positive desire and turns it into a negative one.
I’ll give you a perfectly good example that just happened to me at the time of writing this: I was on vacation and had an excursion booked that got cancelled due to weather. I went to the counter afterwards to confirm the refund, and the lady said that they hadn’t heard that from them and so they have to hear back tomorrow morning before issuing refunds. I was in a perfectly pleasant mood and just went down to chat for a minute, and so when she said that they received notice that the excursion took place (it started but then was ended due to conditions), I explained that it got started but it ended midway through because conditions were too poor to continue. I made sure to sound conversational because I’m sure customer service people are sensitive to irate customers. In the strangest case of instant personality change I’ve seen in a long time, the service person stared straight ahead (I was too the side, so she was staring away from me) and recited in the most monotone voice possible the service response that they need to hear back and can’t do anything and was sorry for the inconvenience. Now, beforehand I was perfectly happy and had positive intent to receive the refund; after that response—which articulated “there’s nothing I can do; go away now” to me—I was livid at the change in treatment from me as a person to me as an inconvenience in her day (note: there was no one else in line—there was no need to respond on autopilot and end the conversation abruptly). For hours afterward, the interaction would pop back into my head and I’d replay it wishing I’d had called out the unnecessary disrespect vs. what I did do, which was hold back my anger and be as polite as I could muster while walking away annoyed when I was perfectly happy literally five seconds earlier.
Now, the positive desires in that scenario were the refund and just a pleasant, just-checking conversation. I was perfectly fine with the answer I was getting (and I did get my refund the next morning, so it was not an issue at all nor did I really expect it to be). But the dehumanizing nature of being treated like you’re being a nuisance when it’s literally the person’s job to interact with customers about these topics turned my desire quickly into a negative one to retaliate with a sarcastic comment that I was so sorry that doing her job was in the way of her being able to stand and do nothing. The perfectly healthy desire was replaced with an unhealthy desire with the addition of that belief that I was receiving dehumanizing service.
Obviously, there are many, many worse desires than this, but the combination of a positive desire and a negative belief is the key to all of them. Yes, every negative desire from getting blackout drunk (positive desire: feel good; negative belief: life sucks and alcohol is my only escape) to killing millions of Jews (positive desire: strong Germany and German people; negative belief: Jews are in the way of that) can be attributed to a positive desire with a negative belief that poisons it. Those situations could be very different if the people in them held the positive desire without those negative beliefs: drinking in moderation for the enjoyment without needing to escape from a believed-to-be sucky life; running on a platform of unity and prosperity of all Germans, including those of Jewish descent. Just one belief can change an otherwise positive desire into a poisonous urge for destruction.
So, your takeaway from these examples is that if you have negative desires, barring a mental illness, it is caused by a positive desire poisoned by a negative belief. So the only solution is for you to try to counteract that negative belief and remind yourself of what you really want. You want to be healthy and well; you don’t want the world to be as unhappy as you because you believe that the people of the world suck. You want to win a competition; you only want the opponent to get injured if you think you can’t beat him or that you have to win at all costs and so it’s better to win due to injury. You want love; you don’t want your former lover to die in a horrific accident. I can say these with certainty because once you are happy, win, or have love in the above situations, you no longer want the bad thing to happen anymore. Because none of that matters when you’re happy—you just want to continue living your happy life. It is the negative belief that changes your desires toward negative outcomes.
As a final point, this applies to self-destructive behaviors, too. If you want to be happy but feel that you don’t deserve to be happy, then you’ll self-sabotage. If you want a lover but don’t feel that you’re worthy, you’ll convey that through your body language and behavior. If you want to look good but believe you’re too fat or have no other control over your life, then you will starve yourself or binge and purge (i.e., anorexia and bulimia). The same principle applies here: positive desire + negative belief = negative desire. To reverse your attitude, you can break apart the negative desire into the negative belief and positive desire and then replace the negative belief with more positive ones. This allows you to then translate the positive desire into more positive thoughts and actions to achieve it instead of focusing on the negative outcome from the negative desire.
In short, all of your original desires are healthy: health, wealth, love, friendships, purpose, etc. When negative thoughts and beliefs creep into your mind, however, those desires turn negative, often in the form of causing harm in retribution to something bad being done to you. As such, it is very important to keep sight of the original, positive desire so you don’t go down a deep, dark path that it’ll be difficult to come back from. Find and change (or override/outweigh) the negative belief, and the unhealthy desire should become healthy again.