Humans are all given diffrent strengths and weaknesses and we make progress based on these. It isn't realistic to judge our progress based on the capabilities of other people and well for myself anyways, when i was trying to get rid of old negative habits for good positive ones I was not taking into account my limitations. What David D Burns says in his book feeling good is that when we do things habitually it is more likely that we stick to that habit instead of changing it. Meaning you are going to have many days and times where you do the thing you are trying to stop doing and there is no shame in that. There is no reason to beat ourselves up for following through with a negative habit, it is human nature and what are we? We're human!
This realization has helped me out greatly when it comes to replacing thoughts on paper. More specifically it helps me replace those shoulds, musts, have tos and outtas. What i do is;
-I will remind myself that this has been a habit for me and that there will be many times I slip up or do the thing i don't want to do and thats alright.
-I can still live with the results after doing whatever it is and its going to take time to break this habit. Slowly I will break this habit
-instead of beating myself up for not fulfilling the whole goal, I will focus on the times when i was triumphant and did make progress to change it.
And let me tell you it is such a huge relief especially when it comes to my top shoulds which are "I should get to bed early", "I shouldn't spend so much time on the comp/videogames", "I should rest more". I'm also feeling more hopeful now and believe it or not i'm actually more excited about changing these habits and am making more progress. Instead of going to bed at 4am i am going to sleep at 2am and this wasn't even anything i planned to do, I just feel more at ease and less afraid. Today I was actually excited about using the relaxation cd and that says alot because i would resist it like the plague. There was a period where i followed through with doing it 3X a day for 4 months and still it did not become a habit because i kept shoulding on myself and kept resisting it in my mind, I ended up stopping it after that time period. I hated it to be honest. The videogame one, well i'm still working on it.
If you are like me you might be thinking "if I stop beating myself up, won't i just stop taking action to change this habit?" Well I thought like this for a very long time but you know what, stopping beating yourself up does not take away your desires to better yourself and to reach goals because what starts to happen is you start to dream of the rewards as opposed to the consequences of not following through with the more positive change.
The best way to really see if what i am saying about this is true is to try it out yourself and then post here and let us know how it went for you.
I really hope this thread reaches the people that truely need it. You all deserve to have joyous and exciting lives!Mike
