Shondaland Staff
“New year, new you” is an adage that escapes almost no one. This shift in the Gregorian calendar often signals us to reboot our lives, and one way to do that is by leaving our not-so-good-for-us habits behind. But as we all know, the process of quitting — or more constructively put, changing — our habits isn’t easy.
Changing a habit starts with understanding how we form that habit. Timothy W. Fong, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, a co-director of the UCLA Gambling Studies Program, and the director of the UCLA Addiction Psychiatry Fellowship, says people come to rely on chocolate, food, coffee, alcohol, drugs, shopping, sex, or what have you because they aren’t sure how to self-soothe when experiencing uncomfortable emotions like anxiety.
“For whatever reason as a society, we’ve been told we should be able to learn to calm ourselves down on our own. We feel we deserve to feel pleasure 100 percent of the time, and the goal is to never experience any sort of pain,” Fong says. “Along the way, we learn that certain things feel really good because they help soothe pain. That’s where we’ve gone wrong over the last 30 years — to put a Band-Aid on any kind of anxiety. Everyone wants life to be fun 120 percent of the time, but it’s not going to be that way. We should not fight the fact that our bodies and our brains respond to little morsels of pleasure — that’s what it’s supposed to do. And we have to embrace that pain, anxiety, suffering, and all that stuff is part of human life, and we need that, probably more than we need pleasure.”
New York-based writer and professor Susan Shapiro says it was pivotal for her to recognize that addiction isn’t about pleasure-seeking as much as it is about pain denial when quitting alcohol, weed, and cigarettes. She wrote a few books about her journey, including — along with the therapist she says “changed her life,” clinical psychologist and addiction specialist Frederick Woolverton, PhD — Unhooked: How to Quit Anything.
As such, Fong says humans run into problems when quitting habits cold turkey. “That’s why New Year’s resolutions all fail — they’re always absolute,” Fong says. “It’s not that people don’t have willpower, it’s that they don’t know how to handle feeling emotionally distressed or emotionally vulnerable. Early arguments would say, ‘When you want to quit something, stay motivated!’ All that positive psychology sounds good, but it doesn’t work. It’s not about motivation and wanting to quit; it’s about learning how to manage both positive and negative emotions.”
It’s not about motivation and wanting to quit; it’s about learning how to manage both positive and negative emotions. (Peter Dazeley/Getty Images)
Humanize your habits
To manage your feelings, Fong says it helps to humanize your relationship to your habit, accept that you’re drawn to it, and acknowledge there are limits to how much you can engage with it. “Don’t run from your emotions; embrace them,” says Fong. “It’s much better for you to indulge in smaller amounts of multiple things than to do one thing excessively. There’s a huge difference between people with pure addiction — they can’t have just one drink because one drink opens up the floodgates — and someone who doesn’t quite meet the clinical criteria for addiction.”
Shapiro did meet that criterion, and understanding her limits helped her to leave her addictions behind. “It’s endless. Nothing will fill in the hole,” says Shapiro. “I have such an addictive personality. The minute I quit one bad habit, I would get addicted to something else. So, I had to be hyperconscious of everything: eating, sleeping, exercise. Twenty years clean and sober, and I can still get hooked on things very quickly, so I have to take action. For example, I’m sick right now with a sore throat and was putting too much honey in my tea, so I threw it out. I know myself, and if it’s not in the apartment, I’m better off.” Shapiro adds that this reminder helps her stay on course: “Beware all excitement because it takes you out of yourself, and you always have to go back to yourself.”
Substitute one feel-good behavior for another
To leave bad habits behind, Fong says it helps to replace them with more constructive, pleasurable pursuits you genuinely enjoy, like an afternoon walk. “So many times, the first step in quitting X is to start Y,” Fong says. “These things won’t take away triggers or vulnerability, but they’ll add tools to your arsenal to help you deal with those feelings and provide you with another option. You might not have a choice about what you’re addicted to, but you do have a choice to build up your menu of options to cope with the s--t of life. It doesn’t necessarily feel good to cope with uncomfortable feelings, but it does feel good to know that you have different options to deal with stress and emotional pain.”
Goal-setting (she wanted to write a book — she’s since published 17) and walking (along with weekly therapy and nicotine patches) helped Shapiro stay on track. “I had to be more selfish and take care of myself first,” she explains. “Going out for drinks or to dinner all the time like I used to wasn’t good for me because it was too hard to be around drinkers, overeaters, and bread baskets. So instead, if a friend, colleague, or student wanted to get together, they could come over and speed walk with me for an hour around the local park. I started calling it my ‘walking office hours.’ That way, I felt much more happy and productive and could still devote time to connect with people I cared about.”
To leave bad habits behind, it helps to replace them with more constructive, pleasurable pursuits you genuinely enjoy, like an afternoon walk. (Susumu Yoshioka/Getty Images)
Prioritize pleasure
Choose a positive, pleasurable behavior that will help you manage emotional pain or distress. “Walking versus reading, talking to a friend, taking a bath, smoking a joint — they’re not all the same neurobiologically or neurochemically; they do different things. That’s why we have to have a diverse set of human activities to maintain mental health and wellness. Instead of saying, ‘Instead of smoking, I’m going to needlepoint instead,’ it helps for the new positive habit to stick if it stands on its own without being tied to the more destructive habit,” says Fong. “Don’t worry about quitting X to start Y. If you do five different things that are Y, eventually that’s going to mean X may not be gone, but X will be less intense or prevalent. Eventually, you’ll strengthen your emotional core so that the situations that drive smoking are handled in a different way.”
Set attainable goals
Choose new pleasurable habits that are attainable and that you’re willing to invest time in. “Any time you want to change behavior, you’ve got to start really slow with something you know you can master. Let’s say you want to start running. Instead of saying, ‘I’m going to go out there and run three miles right now’ — you’re not good at it, you haven’t done it, why would you be able to do it? It’s going to be painful, unpleasant, and it’s not going to be a fun experience. But you can go out right now, and you can run for three minutes. That’s the starting point of making the behavioral change to add something to your life,” says Fong. Eventually, with effort and time (like a month), he says these new practices will become habits themselves.
Don’t beat yourself up
Fong says if you slip, it’s counterproductive to beat yourself up. “When you try to quit anything, the goal shouldn’t necessarily be to quit 100 percent,” Fong explains. “It should be to reduce the harm that the behavior has been doing to you down to as little as possible. Ten cigarettes a year isn’t going to be harmful to you in the long run — it’s not going to raise your level of cancer or create an elevated risk of heart attacks. If you went from a thousand cigarettes a year to 10 a year, your habit of smoking isn’t gone, but the harm is. Your focus should not be so much about winning or losing, but when you’re making changes, reducing the harm from that habit.”
Take it from Shapiro. “I wrote a piece about quitting guilt that started, ‘I spent the last two years saying no,’ and in those two years I got everything I wanted,” she says. “Here’s a line that helped me: ‘When you get rid of a toxic habit, you’re leaving room for something more beautiful to take its place.’”
Vivian Manning-Schaffel is a multifaceted storyteller whose work has been featured in The Cut, NBC News Better, Time Out New York, Medium, and The Week. Follow her on Twitter @soapboxdirty.