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Bad Habits in Recovery
A Better Life in Recovery
The reason why people break away from their addiction is that they desire a better life. If the individual does not believe that things are going to significantly improve for them they will struggle to break away from alcohol and drugs. Giving up the addiction is a great and vital start, but it is usually not enough by itself to ensure a successful sobriety. This is because recovery is said to be a process and not an event. The individual will have more work to do in order to ensure that they establish the type of life that they have always yearned for. One thing that can get in the way of achieving this goal is bad habits.
Bad Habits Defined
Habits refer to routines of behavior that tend to occur subconsciously and that are repeated regularly. For example, a person may always choose the same seat on a bus they get every day because it has become a habit. This type of unconscious behavior can be good or bad. An example of a good habit would be brushing teeth before bed – this is something that most people do automatically and it benefits their life. A bad habit can be defined as a patterned behavior regarded as detrimental to one’s physical or mental health, which is often linked to a lack of self-control. Smoking cigarettes or eating too much junk food would be examples of bad habits. The individual may have a desire to break away from these behaviors but they just feel stuck because these activities have become ingrained.