When dealing with any form of a needed behavioral change, adapting to the required new routine will frequently create an anxiety that will challenge the “holding to” capacity within any of us. Our natural resistance to healthy change is mostly a result of how our negative behaviors have been reinforced and created a pattern (a brain pattern) which we commonly call “a bad habit”. 

In their extreme, these bad habits can become addictions. What distinguishes a bad habit from an addiction is when an individual cannot resist (nor has little resistance) to the lore of the immediate pleasure the substance or the destructive behavior provides and they alter their lives to prioritize seeking that gratification.  

Yet, many of us teeter on the edge of addictions with chronic bad habits that become a real challenge for us to change. One of the biggest obstacles to altering our bad habits is the negative emotion provoked within us when we periodically fail at our attempts to establish a routine of positive behavioral change. The harsh self punitive voice of, “I’m a failure, I hate myself, or I’ve let down everyone again”, leaves us with the new obstacle of a dispassionate self to overcome.  

In an “Addictions Model” of treatment this would be called “Expected Relapse”. The compassionate understanding of how difficult overcoming long established negative behaviors and the associated thinking can be. The old expression, “If you fall off the horse get right back on”, is the lesson of don’t focus or fester on the mistake but seize the opportunity of another try. 

Consistency cannot be approached from a perfectionist point of view. This will only encourage a cycle of returning to the negative behaviors for extended periods of time when a relapse or a giving in to the old habit occurs.

For those who have struggled for a long time with obesity, excessive drinking, overspending, procrastination, or other forms of negative behaviors it is important to seek help in a nonjudgmental supportive environment where a periodic failure can be tolerated, understood, and normalized in the process of establishing positive change.            

Support groups, psychotherapy, classes designed to encourage healthy living, and coaching can all be helpful when attempting to begin viewing yourself as a consistently imperfect, mostly successful and always worth the effort for a normal human being.