Why changing your habits is not enough

Is recovery a choice? Someone who is debilitated by a mental illness and is suffering from self sabotaging behaviour. Does he have the choice to stop at any point or there is a much stronger force acting upon the mind!?

When it comes to the spectrum of actions, your actions can come from three places: behaviours, habits and impulses.

Behaviour are actions that happen fully voluntary and require you to be conscious when you exercise behaviour. Like for example right now you could stop reading this post and do something else instead with relative ease. You have full control over your behaviour, so you have full choice to stop or start any new behaviour you want.

Habits are a way to save energy, after you have been exercising the same behaviour frequent enough, you will adapt to that situation by disengaging your conscious part of the brain. Think for example when you drive, in the beginning it took your full attention and concentration, the more you practiced the more relaxed you have become and you gained the ability to multitask like keep a conversation or listen to music while you are driving.

Habits are composed out of three components: a cue, a routine and a reward. The cue can be any perceived stimulus through your senses that will trigger the routine. After the routine starts your mind switches off and becomes almost unaware about what you are doing. If the routine is interrupted and you are not receiving the anticipated reward at the end of the habit there are strong emotions of anger and frustration that generally take place. Your choices in regard to habits is to either indulge or be abstinent. Because if you stop after the reward started your emotions will overwhelm you and make you complete the routine in order to receive the reward at the end. This is why addicts can't simply learn to be moderate, if you are an alcoholic your choice is either to continue to drink in excess or to stop entirely. In order to practice abstinence you will have to avoid the cues that trigger the routine of your bad habits like stop going to PUBS and night clubs or stop seeing certain people don't keep any alcohol in the house etc.        

Impulses are part of your emergency survival strategies, they are explosive amounts of energy released  over short periods of time. It is like pressing the emergency button in a train, it is going to bring the whole thing to a hold and stop all the momentum in order to keep you safe. Your choice when it comes to impulses is almost zero, after all that's the purpose of an impulse is to trigger an emergency protocol where you just act instinctively without choice in order to maximize your survival chances.

All your bad habits are formed starting from a negative impulse, like someone made you get really angry repeatedly and you start expressing your anger in a very unproductive way, or you felt very sad for a relatively long periods of time and you used alcohol to cope with your sadness.

The impulse is the cue of your bad habits, if in order to practice abstinence you have to avoid the cue that triggers the routine of your bad habit. In order to stop the bad habit you have to stop the impulse, this is why rehabilitation programs that focus on abstinence are mostly unsuccessful. It is not enough to stop the bad habits and replace them with good ones you also have to deal with the cause of the chronic stress that made you develop them in the first place.