Addictive Behaviors Can be Good or Bad.

Choose.

Bad habits are a form of addictive behaviors. So are good habits. When the autonomic system takes over, the default is the path of least resistance. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Addictions can be positive.

Our job is to intervene and elevate through the inculcation of positive new habits. Choose addictive behaviors that serve you rather than destroy you. These are the daily goals that become the habits that will lead you to achieving your dreams.

Good habits are positively addicting.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

• Audio Article – Addictive Behaviors
• Choose Addictive Behaviors
• The Good News About Habits
• Positively Addicting
  • The Day is the Way

AUDIO ARTICLE – Addictive Behaviors: 

Bad habits are a form of addiction. So are good habits. Choose.
~LeAura Alderson, cofounder-iCreateDaily.com®

Addictive Behaviors

Choose the Good Ones

We all have them—both good and bad habits. But if you want to achieve your dreams, or even just feel better, mentally, emotionally and physically, you need to put your habits to work for you, rather than against you.

Patient but Persistent

It takes momentum to create new habits.  You’ve likely spent years repeating certain negative, or non-productive habits. That’s what we creatures do. So be patient and persistent and you will make progress. It is the law.

What sets you apart is the determination to transform the negatives to positives. To replace bad habits with good ones until the good habits crowd out the clamoring of those things which tempt you but do not serve you.

Make a beeline to better. Yes you can.
~LeAura Alderson, iCreateDaily.com®

The Good News About Habits

The great news is that good habits are also addictive — they’re positively addicting. If you choose a goal of regular exercise, that goal, done repeatedly, becomes a habit that you do without a second thought, and one which you miss if you can’t do it.

A writer who sets the goal to write daily will see that goal become a habit that requires no effort or motivation or muse to engage. That goal becomes the habit of daily writing. The resistance to it, the challenges in doing it, the exhausting deliberations about doing it are all removed.

The friction of resistance disappears when your goals—done repeatedly—become habits.

I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.
~Stephen Covey, educator, author, businessman, 1932-2012

Positively Addicting

Ask a runner or someone who exercises regularly what happens to them if they don’t work out. Most will say that their mood and state of mind suffers. Some will say they actually go through withdrawal symptoms like bad moods, anxiety or even depression.

Fitness fanatics are addicted to the positive habit of exercise.

Most did not start there. Most addictions accrue over time. Both the good ones and the bad ones. So nurture that which nurtures your aspirations and those positive habits will grow stronger in your life and crowd out the others.

“We become what we repeatedly do.”
~Stephen Covey, educator, author,1932-2012

The Day is the Way

That is the core of what iCreateDaily is all about. Daily incremental steps. Repeated. Remember your core. That’s who you’re doing it for. Because that…. that is who you really are.

All the other “stuff”, in the end, is inconsequential. But fulfilling your dreams… one goal at a time? That is what matters.

I rally my belief in a better world… a better self… a finished creation, and with delight in mind I step firmly on this path to better.
~LeAura Alderson, cofounder-iCreateDaily.com®

Substitute Negatives for Positives

For every negative habit there is a positive counter habit. So for anything you’re looking to turn around, instead of focusing on not doing the bad thing, focus on doing a good thing. Replacement therapy works if you apply it regularly with diligence, especially in the beginning of the forming of the positive addictive behavior.

Whatever it is… thoughts, mindset, work habits, diet, exercise and just about anything, you can find a positive opposite of the negative that is not serving you. Once you begin the reframing and replacement therapy, you’ll pick up speed as that will become your default go-to… your way of life.

Choose One New Positive Habit Per Month. Just One.

Choose one new good habit today and invite it again tomorrow. Soon it will be a healthy, positive addiction that serves you. If you need help in jumpstarting yours, this good habits list should help.

Practice a positive new habit daily for 30 days and you’ll have a new habit firmly in place.

This cognitive restructuring is a powerful ally in your efforts to replace good habits for bad ones. This works for thoughts, feelings, habits and addictions.

Calm Over Chaos

And remember… just because we have an urge doesn’t mean we have to act on it. Addictive impulses come from our physical-emotional self… our lower, animal nature. We are mammals, after all. But we’re also souls… we are divinity.

Chaos rules when the lower reigns. Best to turn over the reins… and the reigns. Be the gentle but firm rider… “the horse whisperer”, not the horse. Best to tame our wild horses and work with them, putting them to work for us, rather than be trampled by them.

You Have the Power

Act on what you know you should be doing. Don’t act on that which detracts. You are at choice.

Those of us with strong addictions know that working with habitual patterns begins with the willingness to fully acknowledge our urge, and then the willingness not to act on it. 
~Pema Chödrön, American Buddhist nun, author, b.7/13/1936

Just One Thing

Often, our next level of growth is as simple as replacing a bad habit for a good one. If you’re addicted to procrastination, for instance, then to choose to do without delay or excuses is as close as your next decision.

If it’s procrastination that plagues you, imagine just how much more power will be available to you by exchanging that one bad habit for a good one.

Procrastination is exhausting. Quick action, even when wrong, will move you further ahead faster.

Whatever it may be for you… that one thing that if wasn’t there, If there’s something in the way of your next level of growth, you don’t have to stay stuck on that. Identify one thing that’s a positive opposite of that, and do it. 

Then do it again. And again… daily, steadily, one day at a time, and in short order, that which plagued you will have been replaced by a positively constructive addiction.

Just one thing, big or small.

You can do it!

The Missing Link

The missing link from where we are to where we want to go is often hesitancy and an absence of unwavering commitment. 

If we commit to it… truly commit to it, it’s done. The decision is over. It’s simply not an option. The disease of addictions can have a different root cause and require more serious interventions, but for most of us, addictions are more a choice we’ve not yet decided not to make.

If we’re not a smoker, then considering whether or not to light up a cigarette simply isn’t an option we consider. But if we do smoke, but want to quit, then we commit to it and decide that it simply isn’t an option. We rewrite our story of ourself as not being that person.

A true commitment is to render that habit as simply not an option. That habit no longer exists in our life. 

If the habit is overeating, that’s certainly harder for we can’t not do food. However we absolutely can not do food that’s bad for us.

We replace the bad food habits with the good food habits… foods we also love but that are good for us. I call that food Aikido… it’s taking that energy and redirecting it from where it wants to go to where we want it to go. 

All desire is energy. When it comes to changing habits, we deflect the energy from the negative and redirect it into the positives. We’re the traffic cop seeing that energy and directing it where it needs to go.

I know for I have “recovered” from different addictions in my life.

If we’re creating a path in the woods or meadow, we walk that same path everyday and it becomes well worn and easily accessible, without effort. Meanwhile, the path we need to ignore becomes overgrow with lack of use and ceases to be seen as an option to traverse.

The missing link is commitment. 

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.”
~William Hutchison Murray, Scottish mountaineer and writer, 1913-1996

A Good Movie – Triumphant Story

We recently enjoyed the movie of this heart warming true story, A Street Cat Named Bob. More than a movie, there are a number of books out now about Bob. Basically, Bob saved the author’s life… and together, they’re now profiting and serving many others by sharing their story and working to help homeless people and animals.

A testament to the power of persistence and the forces at work helping us, even when it’s not evident. Definitely recommended for writers and animal lovers and anyone interested in powerful, heartwarming transformation stories.

What sets you apart is the determination to transform the negatives to positives. To replace bad habits with good ones until the good habits crowd out the clamoring of those things which tempt you but do not serve you.
~LeAura Alderson, cofounder-iCreateDaily.com®

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