Deeds to Habit
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How to Break Bad Habits
May 5, 2020
How can we get rid of bad habits and addictions? Justin Parrott describes the psychology of bad habits and offers practical mindfulness techniques to help break them.
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatu. This is Justin for Yaqeen Institute, and I'm here again to talk to you about good habits, but this time we're going to talk about getting rid of our bad habits. So sometimes we get stuck in bad habits. It might be eating bad eating habits, we're eating junk food, or eating unhealthy foods. Could be something more serious like smoking or drinking. We all have some kind of bad habits that we have to work on and get rid of and I'm going to talk a little bit about something that can help you get through that today. So it's important to recognize that bad habits come from our nafs. So our nafs is that part of our soul that is interested in instant gratification, wants pleasure now, it doesn't think about the long term. Your mind thinks about the long term, but not your nafs, right? Your nafs just wants to be pleased in this instant, and that's where our bad cravings and our bad addictions and our bad habits come from. Because we recognize that these are bad habits, our mind recognizes that they're bad, but we haven't been able to overpower our nafs and end those bad habits. So this is a jihad actually. So in this regard the Messenger of Allah, Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam said, المجاهد من جاهد نفسه The Mujahid, the one who wages jihad is he who wages jihad against his own nafs, against his lower self, that primitive part of your brain, right? That primitive part of your soul, right? So this is a jihad, it's a great struggle and it's something that we all have to do, right? None of us are immune from that. We all have that nafs inside of us and we all have to overcome it. So I'm going to talk a little bit about, tell you how a bad habit sort of gets stuck in place. So when we have a bad habit, we have something that triggers us.
So we have something that triggers a bad eating habit, something that triggers us, wants to make us smoke, it's a stimulus, it makes us want to drink, it makes us want to do something wrong. Bad habit could be something like backbiting, it doesn't have to be necessarily be something you consume, right? But we have a trigger, right? Something makes us angry, that makes us lash out and you know, some kind of stimulation. And then this results in an impulse or a craving. So you feel like you have to do this, you have to eat this junk food, you have to smoke, you have to drink, you have to talk back to that person. And in that moment, that's when you decide how you're going to react, right? Because you feel this craving monster come at you and you think there's no, the only way I'm going to relieve this monster who's standing over me is by giving into the craving, right? And that's a false choice, actually. So I'm going to tell you about a psychological technique. This is a mindfulness technique that was developed by psychologist Alan Marlatt. It's called urge surfing or surfing the urge. So this is to observe your urges mindfully. So when I get the urge to eat junk food or whatever, I just need to take a pause, step back, be present and then just observe that feeling and kind of put some distance between you and that feeling and that craving. And then just kind of let it come up and then let it come back down, just like you're surfing on a wave. Like imagine if you're a surfer, the craving is the wave, you're just going to surf on top of the wave and then the wave is going to come back down. Because these cravings don't last forever, right? In the moment, it doesn't feel like that. You feel like the only way you're going to get through this is by giving into the craving. But in reality, those cravings are going to dissipate. And we're fasting the month of Ramadan, Hamad Lillah. And do you notice in the month of Ramadan that your hunger pangs eventually go away, right? You will feel hungry at some point in the day, but then that goes away. Those hormones that make you hungry, those run out, and then you're not hungry anymore and you can continue, right?
So this is about, this is how you surf the urge. It's just like when we get through hunger in Ramadan, right? And so Ibn Qayyim says, Rahim Allah, in this regard, something good statement. He said, فالخاطر كالمرّي على الطريق فإن تركته مرّا وانصرف عنك So he says that the thoughts, so we have these thoughts of craving, they're like passersby on the road. If you leave them as you pass by, they will depart from you, right? So these cravings, they come up, we meet them when we're passing by on the road of life. These cravings pop up or these bad thoughts pop up, and we just need to ignore them and just keep walking, right? Bring our mindfulness back to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, right? And don't engage that craving, right? Don't engage the thoughts about that craving. That's where people go wrong, because when you engage the thoughts, you strengthen the thoughts, you give oxygen to them, and then they're going to continue to bother you, right? So we need to practice this mindfulness skill of getting over the cravings, right? And then once you do this a few times, several times, you won't have those cravings anymore, or they'll be much lesser and easier to defeat. And so I call this getting over the hump. So we get over this really difficult part where we've defeated our cravings, and then it becomes easier. It's like going downhill after that. But once you do that, don't go back to the cravings, right? So if you have a problem with alcohol and smoking, once you get over your cravings and you don't desire those things anymore, don't go back to it, right? Because then that's going to reactivate all those pathways in your brain, and that's going to be really bad, and you're going to have to go back to square one and start all over again, right? So once you get over the hump, don't go back to that sin. Don't go back to that bad habit. So we ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala to bless us and to guide us in the month of Ramadan, and may Allah break our bad habits and replace them with good habits. Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh.
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