It feels good to be more and more miserable during lonely and hurtful times. Learn about what causes bad habits to know how to break them!
What causes bad habits? Before I share my perspective on that, “bad habits” in this post are those that ruin one’s physical health.
Smoking. Alcohol abuse. Eating problems. Sleep problems. While procrastination and obsessing over your crush are bad habits, this post is not about those.
Here are the main causes of bad habits:
- Some bad habits are formed when we are hurting.
- If we have friends with bad habits, we will copy them to keep the friendship.
- What started as exploring harmful activities became habits.
Let’s begin.
What Causes Bad Habits: Smoking, Alcohol Abuse, and More
I thought of talking about what causes bad habits while I was taking a collagen capsule many nights ago. I need to take care of my skin!
The capsule was in between my lips at the time because I was picking up my water bottle, and then I thought of cigarettes and wondered why people smoke.
I am what many people call boring.
I don’t drink alcohol, but I have tasted alcohol. The strongest alcoholic beverage I drank had 14% alcohol content. It was a bottle of soju.
I love eating Korean spicy noodles. Koreans often pair spicy noodles with a bottle of soju. I wanted to try it out, so I bought one bottle.
Apparently, there is a right way to drink soju. wikiHow has a guide on how to drink soju in a way that is acceptable to Koreans.
But I also tasted the kind of alcohol that alcoholic people drink, but only a glass or two in total. I had a lot of alcoholic friends in college, who were harmless, so taking a sip was inevitable when I was with them.
There are no drinkers in my family. My father and my older brother, in particular, are allergic to alcohol. That is one reason why I don’t drink.
I don’t smoke either. I never did. There are also no smokers in our family that’s why, although there are a few if we include my extended family.
I can’t write from experience because I have bad habits, but not the bad habits everyone considers bad: smoking, drinking alcohol, undereating, overeating, etc.
Those are the focus of this post: the bad habits that everyone, except for those who enjoy those, considers bad because it has negative health impacts.
Let us talk about what causes bad habits, or those habits in particular.
1. Some bad habits are formed when we are hurting.
I experienced being on the verge of having bad habits, and it happened when I was too hurt. Pain can make us want to ruin our lives.
It is easy for many people to say that people can choose to deal with pain in a healthy way — that problematic people have chosen to be problematic.
But sometimes, the pain we feel prevents us from seeing the pleasant path.
If we are emotionally messed up, we want to be more messed up and ruin our lives. Maybe it is self-pity, being overly dramatic, or feeling undeserving of good things.
According to Tiny Buddha, people are by nature attention seekers, so they enjoy being pitied.
Regardless, it feels better to be more and more miserable during lonely and hurtful times. So, that is one of the things that causes bad habits: pain.
When I realized that, I started thinking about the untold stories of those who look problematic. Is it because of heartbreak? Loss of a loved one? Mistakes?
I am wondering what could have happened if life had been good to everyone since the moment we were born. But who, even, is life?
Would the world become better if people knew from the beginning that their decisions and behaviors affect other people, even indirectly?
Sadly, many people don’t think of the consequences of their actions. But then, even if we think about the consequences, we can still hurt others.
I am wondering why life is this way. I am not questioning, really just wondering.
But no matter the reason, I think that even though the world is too complicated to understand, complicated is better than simple.
I have painful stories in my heart, but I wouldn’t want to throw all of them away if I were given a chance because they help me understand other people.
2. If we have friends with bad habits, we will copy them to keep the friendship.
All of us have done something solely because our friends did it. Peer pressure. That is one of the causes of bad habits.
Even if you are secure with yourself and independent, you want to join your friends in whatever they do because it is more fun. Less friction!
Verywell Mind explains that peer pressure is the pressure from your social circle who influences you to do things you wouldn’t have done if not for them.
I know how stressful it is being a killjoy. Many of my friends were extroverts, and I often went against their plans because I would rather relax.
My refusal to do what they wanted made the air gloomy. Not good.
Try to look back and trace the origin of your bad habits. Some of them likely started with friends, even friends from grade school.
3. What started as exploring harmful activities became habits.
Let me give you a real-life example, and I am the main character.
I grew up in a traditional family where I was expected not to say bad words. If my parents heard me curse, I would be lectured. I was lectured once.
I am a virgin. I can’t think of the right reason for that, but I think it is more because of my personal love choices than my parents’ expectations.
My parents had their first child, which is my older brother, before marriage and when my mom was 18. Would they have expectations in that regard?
Psychology Today says that it is okay for parents to have expectations, but the child’s interests, talents, and tendencies must be considered.
Those are not bad habits, but as you can see, I live a restricted life. When you live a restricted life, you wonder what happens if you remove the restrictions.
You will want to rebel.
If you are surrounded by bad habits and easily influenced, you will want to try them out even if you know they are bad for your health.
You will wonder: How bad are bad habits?
But to find the answer, you need to keep doing it. And then you will be surprised when you realize it has become your habit. Shucks!
I haven’t gotten drunk to the point that I forget or don’t know what I do. Once, I drank more beers than my friends did to check how I could get there.
I was scared of getting raped, though, so I decided to discover that with my future husband. I am saving myself for marriage.
Last Words
I don’t smoke and drink alcohol, so I am not attracted to those who smoke and drink alcohol. We want to be with people who do similar things.
But it is not because I think those people are “dirty” or anything. The thing is, I don’t want to be with someone who kills himself.
Since I was in college, I have been telling people about that if they ask me about my type. I rejected men before just because of that.
Smoking and drinking alcohol have negative effects on our health.
Of course, when we have feelings for people, we care about them. If I were to enter into a relationship with him, I would care about him.
But I wouldn’t want to care about him if he didn’t care about himself.
You know what causes bad habits. Ready to break yours?
If you enjoyed reading what causes bad habits and how to break them, here is a video of me talking about my bad habits, which you may not consider bad:
