theaspirationalmind.com
Unwanted Temptation
Bad Habits
We can sometimes think of long-term self-satisfying habits (drink, drugs, eating, sex, self-harm, excessive exercise, and so on) as foibles, or vices, or addictions, or something else that hides their true nature.
And, we all have habits, behaviour patterns repeated time and again and often unnoticed. It is possible to argue that all habits, whether good, bad or indifferent, could do with changing if they have become automatic or are not fit for purpose. But the habits that we are considering here are those that we think of as bad in some sense.
What makes these habits ‘bad’ is that at some level we want to change but have so far failed to do so. We want to control or change our behaviour but we keep finding ourselves repeating the same old thing, whatever harm it may do us physically, socially, emotionally, or financially.
I suggest that such ‘bad’ habits are evident in most human beings and in many cases are associated with what I call Unwanted Temptation. It is this temptation, rising up from our own inner Automatic Mind and sometimes hooked into social yearnings from our Social Mind, that leads to struggle or directly to repetition of our behaviour pattern.
Definition of Temptation
Dictionaries give various definitions of temptation which often include references to an urge, desire, or pressure to do something that brings forbidden pleasure, or is wrong, or evil. I suggest a slightly different definition here for the particular nature of temptations that drive our bad habits that is a little more revealing: “A desire to perform an action or activity that at some time in the past has brought pleasure.”
Source of Temptation
There are many natural and effectively hard-wired desires, such as the desire to eat, the desire to sleep, the desire to have sex. These can all be converted into problems if the desire becomes excessive or compulsive. These natural desires are all about basic survival and, when not converted into something else, they have genuine value.
There are also desires that form around unnatural activities, such as smoking, drink, drugs, danger, notoriety, gambling, shopping, and so on. Many of these come to actually damage our lives and yet we build desires around them despite our better judgment. This happens as a learning process over time and it begins with stimulation of an internal sense of pleasure. It may well be that the activity is not directly the thing that brings the pleasure but simply part of a pleasurable experience of being with friends, or being given approval by other people, or achieving a personal goal. These early experiences of gratification or pleasure rapidly become associated in our subconscious mind and memory with particular activities, even those that initially may revolt us. So smoking, drinking, gambling, and so on soon become non-consciously associated with something that we value highly; pleasure, approval, or some other social or personal reward.
Once made, these associations tend to stay in place and our own subconscious then uses these as a primary means of trying to deliver those things that we seek. When we are unhappy, or angry, or lonely, or sorry for ourselves our Automatic Mind suggests smoking, drinking, gambling etc. as the way to get out of it. Thus a desire is created and used time after time after time. There is more to it, of course, such as the way our non-conscious associations tend to ignore failures and enhance the importance of beneficial changes, but overall this is the basis for unwanted desire and temptation.
At a conscious level we come to realise that some of our desired activities are not good for us, because of health issues, because of the impact on the rest of our lives, or because the growing internal mental discomfort. At a conscious level we want to manage or even stop certain of our habitual activities but our automatic associations undermines our best intentions with the persistent up-welling of desire. And not only that, when we struggle with these urgings from our Automatic Mind we may inadvertently be making matters worse as our desire grows in response to the discomfort of the struggle.
Unwanted Temptation
Not all temptations are necessarily unwanted. Appetite, for example, is the temptation that encourages us to eat when our body needs nourishment. An unwanted temptation is one that is at odds with our overall life purposes or higher intentions. An unwanted temptation is something that undermines our ability to live our life in the way that we actually want to.
This can be thought of as prevarication, or having competing-purposes, or being weak-willed, or not really knowing what we want. We have times when we convince ourselves to give up certain self-destructive behaviours but these often do not last, we find ourselves having battles with ourselves that we frequently lose and give in to a seductive temptation to engage once again with the unwanted behaviour. This becomes a repeating cycle where all that we really succeed in doing is to learn that we may as well just give in to the temptation in order to avoid the discomfort of the struggle.
This is basically a struggle between our logical Planning Mind and our Cultural and Automatic Minds.
The Problem With Willpower
When we fight or struggle against our unwanted temptations we tend to try and use our willpower. But willpower does not achieve the change that we want or seems to involve too much pain and struggle. What we do achieve through willpower can often be undermined just when it seems that we have nearly succeeded. Our subconscious desires overwhelm our rational ability to resist and we end up self-indulging once again.
Just like temptation, willpower has many aspects and definitions. One view is that willpower is a conscious choice to control our behaviour. This can be interpreted as a choice to ignore or overcome our ‘natural’ urges or what we think of as a lack of motivation. In this simple view it is also recognised that conscious willpower is normally limited by our ability to apply concentration. As long as we hold to a decision then willpower does its job but as soon as our concentration moves to something else, or lapses, or our commitment wavers and willpower can collapse.
There are two particular points to note about this view of willpower:
The Automatic Mind is thought by some to be unable to handle negative statements, so a thought such as “I want no more of this” can be interpreted by the Automatic Mind as “I want more of this”, the negative is ignored. Because willpower is designed to overcome other motivations it is able to handle the negatives that we commonly use in everyday language and so can handle “I will have no more of this” and will act against non-conscious urgings that get in the way. The rules of language often espoused as appropriate to positive psychology do not necessarily apply to willpower.
The second point is that willpower is apparently a process of logic and so comes from the conscious part of the mind and is only effective as long as we concentrate. It is essentially a short-term, though potentially powerful, director of behaviour. More about this below.
Return