Everyone has a plan (New Year’s Resolutions) until they get punched in the mouth (feeling unexpectedly worse-off after quitting).
Here’s how to stop this from sabotaging your attempts to break bad habits and live a better life → New Reddit article
We all have our experiences with failed New Year’s Resolutions.
Whether they’re set to end bad habits like compulsive Reddit scrolling, or to cut back on alcohol or sugar, breaking the promises you make to yourself will leave you feeling frustrated, self-critical, and jaded.
We tend to blame our lack of self-control and willpower for our failings. Yet, as you’ll come to see, it’s actually the unexpected arrival of negative feelings—lethargy, unhappiness, irritability—and the thoughts and excuses they provoke, that ultimately results in things unraveling.
Laura McKowen describes this perfectly it in her book We Are the Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life,
“In the first year of trying to get sober, I was tired all the time. Not the adrenaline-fueled tired I used to feel when I was still drinking, but something more weighted and bone level, like the flu… More than once, I called in sick to work because I simply could not drag my body there… I slept eight, ten, twelve hours a night… And although I would have occasional bursts of almost manic energy… mostly I felt like I was slogging through mud.
I found this to be so frustrating and unfair because it seemed like now that I wasn't drowning myself in wine every night, life should automatically be… easier. Better. My body should feel like a demigod’s. I wanted the energy to do all the things lighting up my brain: write more, start a podcast, start my book, fix up my apartment, clean my car, paint my bedroom, find a boyfriend, live—but most days, I could barely make it through the afternoon without crying.”
So, just like only a dark and damp environment can yield mold and rot, it’s during our dark mental confusion and frustration that the first spores of rationalizations and excuses begin to form. It’s there that you’ll get that twisted little thought that says (in an impish voice)…
hey, maybe this whole “giving up Reddit and Instagram and Junk Food thing” is actually not all that good of an idea. I mean, look at how crappy you feel? You’re worse than before! Maybe you’d be better off—happier, more at ease and energized—if you got your little innocent doses of gratification. Maybe you don’t want to stick with these “resolutions” after all.
With thoughts like these, no amount of “willpower” or “self-control” will help. Once rational excuses have been formed, once you begin to believe that you’re better off with your vices than without—made ever-more evident with the deepening of these awful moods and feelings—it’s never long before you give in and for you to be back to your old habits.
…
I’m tempted to use the word ‘withdrawal effects’ here, but that’s not it. Unless your resolution was to give up meth (or perhaps more fittingly, alcohol or heaping amounts of sugar), you’re not going to feel physical effects from abruptly quitting. Yet, even if is the case, withdrawal effects are a temporary and a treatable part of recovery.
So what’s up with this sudden drop in happiness and well-being? What is it that, as McKowen puts it, weighs you down and gives you flu like symptoms?
Understand that you began your bad habits for a good reason. It started long ago, probably in your adolescence, when you would grab at your vices for relief. Relief from all that pained and troubled you: insecurities, stresses, pressures, disappointments, worries, overwhelm, traumas.
Or maybe it didn’t start off that way. Maybe, like me, you started playing Super Mario because playing Super Mario is fun. Yet it didn’t take long before your subconscious began to associate “fun” with an easy distraction from stress and discomfort. So now as an adult, you game to have fun and as a means of escape—that is until it's past 2am and the game has long stopped being fun and is now just an ever amplifying compulsion to delay reality.
Simply put, you formed bad habits as coping mechanisms. And it worked—it still works—it’s just now the thing itself provokes it’s own slew of ill-consequences, ranging from the stress and panic of procrastination, to the regret of wasted hours and opportunities, which themselves need more and more doses of vice for relief.
So it’s natural that once you go Cold-Turkey on your vice, the pain and discomfort it suppressed so expertly will creep back in.
…
So then what is the solution?
First off, just becoming aware of all this is a super important start. This whole phenomenon truly is unexpected more than anything else. So the next time you attempt to end a bad habit (or right now if you've just started), see it coming and prepare for it.
Treat it like a flu. Give yourself the time to rest and sleep. Give yourself permission not to start a million good habits, not to chase your dreams just yet, just because you stopped with the bad habits and that’s what everyone says you need to do.
Stop pretending to be all swell and chipper and grateful for every blessing of a breath because you’ve convinced yourself this is how you’re supposed to be and feel, now that you’re “free”. Just allow what is to be.
Next, I suggest you tier down with your vices.
This is a common theme in pretty much all the sober memoirs I’ve read. Once the person gives up alcohol (a Tier 1 vice), they allow themselves to indulge in lesser comforts (Tier 2 vices) to help cope with the flu. Think Netflix binges curled up under layers of blankets with a Costco bag of Sour Patch Kids. They tier down.
Tier 1: Alcohol, drugs, smoking, heavy gambling
↓
Tier 2: Junk food, shows and movies, entertainment, news and social media, video games, porn.
↓
Tier 3: books, music, art, puzzles, hobbies, naps, unsweetened teas, courses and educational digital media, journaling, seeing friends, long walks, outdoor recreation.
↓
Tier 4: Exercise, grooming and body-care, chores, cooking, checking email or other “busy-work” (all done to procrastinate on important work or tasks).
So if right now your vices happen to be Netflix binges and Sour Patch Kids (Tier 2), then go ahead and allow yourself to indulge in a trashy chick-lit novel or lie down while listening to an old rap album you loved as a teen (Tier 3).
As you’ll see in a second, you’re going to have to do the tedious work of dealing with the source of the bad feelings, yet nobody has the stamina to grind through this 24/7. You can’t be faulted for taking a break and allowing yourself a little distraction.
The consequences of your new coping vices must be an order of magnitude less than before. Otherwise, they will lead to a compounding, feedback effect where the vice itself adds to the misery and provokes the need for more and more.
The side-effects of the medication must be acceptable, relative to the original issue. Sure, you might gain weight after quitting cigarettes, but that's better than gaining a tumor in your lung. You can deal with that later.
…
And finally, there’s addressing the source of the flu and managing its symptoms.
There's a reason why the 12-step AA program is still ubiquitously prescribed to deal with substance abuse, despite it’s antiquated religious underpinnings. Pretty much all the addiction books I’ve read have criticized it, yet they invariably acknowledge that it contains one critical aspect for recovery: taking stock of your life.
This entails looking back with clear, unbiased eyes; taking full responsibility for everything you did or failed to do, and learning more mature and productive ways to thrive rather than to merely cope.
For you, this step can be facilitated with professional help—particularly if you have abuse, trauma or self-harm in your past.
Yet even if your upbringing was all peachy and your current circumstances are fine, all of us have to live with what I call "the refrigerator hum of the human condition". This is the base anxiety we feel about the impermanence of, well, everything.
We worry that what we have, from our youth to our lives, will inevitably be lost. We worry that the 'good' we have today, however meager, will fade and make way for more and more 'bad'.
All of this—our troubling past and our worrisome future—can be a heavy burden to carry. So finding better ways to deal with the anxiety—better than grabbing at our phones for a quick distraction and reward—is essential.
For me, I have found mindfulness and acceptance to be indispensable tools on my journey (and there are research backed professional therapies that center on these). The process and goal is simple, yet profoundly effective: to just observe the discomfort and pain, to detach from it and cut the ruminations and judgements about what it is and what it means about yourself. To just let it be and accept it.
It’s only by accepting what is, and that the 'what is' will change tomorrow, that you can move on and live with peace of mind today. This is not easy, but it can be done.
…
The one requirement in all this is time.
Time will pass, and the flu symptoms will dissipate, especially as you ease your way into good habits of self-care, self-love, self-compassion, meaningful work, and selfless acts.
Your life will get better in the wake of stopping your bad habit and its ill consequences. You were perfectly right to set that expectation. It just takes time—much more time than you’d expect.
Except now you will expect, and prepare for, the unexpected.
- Simon ㋛
** I also posted this to Reddit. If you found it useful and would like others to check it out, take a second to upvote it here or drop a comment here.