Bad Habits Aren’t All Bad

Bad Habits Aren’t All Bad

 You drink to much coffee and you know it. You have to cut back but you have tried and it is just too hard. You succeed for a day or two, but something always happens and you are back to where you started. The problem may be that you are trying to give up all of your habit, not just the negative parts. There are good parts to bad habits. You don’t have to give all of a habit away.

Any habit, good or bad, is made up of a bunch of different payoffs. For example, we might drink coffee for the caffeine hit. However we also look forward to the ritual of brewing¹ it, or the flavour and aroma². We enjoy the social side of coffee, or the chance to get away from work for a while. These, and more, are the payoffs from our coffee habit.

Out of these payoffs, there are some that are bad for us and others that are not. Usually with coffee, a person will decide to reduce or quit the habit because of the negative effects of the caffeine. Is it necessary to cut out all of the payoffs, by taking the clean sweep approach? Usually not. If we get rid of all of the payoffs at once, we are asking for failure.

    Instead of cutting out all of the payoffs, good and bad, we can retain the harmless parts and give ourselves a much higher chance of success.

Instead of cutting out all of the payoffs, good and bad, we can retain the harmless parts and give ourselves a much higher chance of success. With our coffee example, all we have to do is identify ways that retain or replicate³ these positive payoffs without the caffeine, which is the negative payoff.

Of course this flies in the face of conventional addiction⁴ treatment. Some would say that this opens up the opportunity for a habit to re-establish itself. I am not an expert on serious addictions⁵. All I know is that it is possible to retain some aspects of a habit without keeping the negative habit itself. I see this as a better alternative, to leave a gaping⁶ hole in your life where the habit used to be. I believe it is better to keep as many of the payoffs intact and concentrate on only getting rid of the negative ones.

So here is the process:

   1. Identify all of the payoffs from the habit you are trying to break. This can take some serious thinking if you want to get to the heart of it.

   2. Decide which of these payoffs are directly related to the negative consequences that you are trying to get rid of.

   3. Decide if, and how, it will be possible for you to retain the other payoffs while avoiding the ones you want to dump.

   4. Get to work.

If you apply yourself to this, you should experience much more success in modifying your habits. Give it a shot and see if you can drop the bad parts of a habit but still retain the good parts. Remember, bad habits aren’t all bad.

1 brewing   

n. 酿造, 一次酿造的量 动词brew的现在分词形式

参考例句：

• It was obvious that a big storm was brewing up. 很显然，一场暴风雨正在酝酿中。
• She set about brewing some herb tea. 她动手泡一些药茶。

2 aroma   

n.香气，芬芳，芳香

参考例句：

• The whole house was filled with the aroma of coffee.满屋子都是咖啡的香味。
• The air was heavy with the aroma of the paddy fields.稻花飘香。

3 replicate   

v.折叠，复制，模写；n.同样的样品；adj.转折的

参考例句：

• The DNA of chromatin must replicate before cell division.染色质DNA在细胞分裂之前必须复制。
• It is also easy to replicate,as the next subsection explains.就像下一个小节详细说明的那样，它还可以被轻易的复制。

4 addiction   

n.上瘾入迷，嗜好

参考例句：

• He stole money from his parents to feed his addiction.他从父母那儿偷钱以满足自己的嗜好。
• Areas of drug dealing are hellholes of addiction,poverty and murder.贩卖毒品的地区往往是吸毒上瘾、贫困和发生谋杀的地方。

5 addictions   

瘾( addiction的名词复数 )； 吸毒成瘾； 沉溺； 癖好

参考例句：

• He has removed the stigma of drug addictions. 他已经洗去吸毒的污点了。
• Intelligent people are good at using reason to control excessive addictions. 智慧的人善于用理性来控制过度的嗜欲。

6 gaping   

adj.口的；张口的；敞口的；多洞穴的v.目瞪口呆地凝视( gape的现在分词 )；张开，张大

参考例句：

• Ahead of them was a gaping abyss. 他们前面是一个巨大的深渊。
• The antelope could not escape the crocodile's gaping jaws. 那只羚羊无法从鱷鱼张开的大口中逃脱。 来自《简明英汉词典》