Think Results NOW: You Are What You Think book 1 – #8: Positive Habits Are Habit-Forming Too

You Are What You Think book 1

Article #8

My life is an Excellent Adventure from using “You Are What You Think”

Positive Habits Are Habit-Forming Too

HABITS CONTROL our lives !

The molding, changing, and building of character is largely a matter of establishing habits. Our characters are made up of acquired habits.

It takes a conscious effort to form constructive habits. It’s easy to drift into undesirable habits by going along with the crowd, and doing as your friends are doing.

THE SAD PART IS that when the time comes to break your habit you will have to do it alone. Your friends won’t be there to help you.

Knowing this, it is easy to understand that it is to your advantage to establish habits that will be beneficial to you, and to eliminate the detrimental ones.

Before going into the methods to use to do this, let us define a habit, according to the Yoga philosophy. Yoga goes back about eight thousand years, and places the utmost importance on the control of the mind. We will also use it methods of overcoming habits and forming new ones.

THE YOGA MASTERS likened the brain to soft clay. They explain that when a thought or an action is repeated many times it makes an impression on the brain. It is like a rut, or a groove, or a channel. The Sanskrit word for this is samskaras.

Think of a record player in which the needle has become stuck. The grove or rut it is in keeps getting deeper and it can’t get out.

When your thoughts and actions follow the same pattern for any length of time, you get in a rut like the needle ! Once that groove is formed and an impression made on your brain it becomes increasingly difficult NOT to continue thinking and acting in the same way.

YOU CAN ALREADY see why habits are so hard to break.

This explains why people seldom change. If they do change, it is usually only temporarily, because they don’t stay away from their old ways long enough for the grooves to level off.

If they would stay with their new way of life long enough for new grooves to form and become deep, it would become just as easy for them to follow their new ways as it formerly was their old !

IT IS OBVIOUSLY much more difficult to break a habit once the grooves have become deeply imbedded in the brain.

Using this knowledge, a young person can easily choose the habits he will want to keep for the rest of his life, because good habits make grooves the same as destructive ones.

In the same way he can be on his guard to prevent grooves from forming that he wouldn’t want. You must remember that you can get in a “rut” simply by repetition !

PICTURE YOURSELF on the top of a hill pouring water from a bucket and watch it trickling down. Then continue to pour, and you will observe that the water is inclined to follow the paths, or channels, that have already been formed.

If you decided to direct the water in a new direction you would have to put an extra amount of force behind the flow. You would do your best to keep it away from the deeper channels so that they would gradually level off. The longer you were able to do this the easier it would become.

Now you can see how the way you habitually think and act will determine the kind of life you will have.

IF YOU WANT TO develop new habits and get rid of the old, you must put FORCE and CONSISTENCY behind your new thoughts and actions.

Keep the image of the water trickling down the hill in your mind when you find yourself faltering in your resolves.

The only way to eliminate the unwanted impressions that have been made on your brain is to completely stop doing the things that caused them to form in the first place !

LIKE ANY OTHER groove or channel they will gradually become non-existent if they are not used.

At the same time, you must put all of your effort and concentration into forming new ones of a positive, beneficial nature.

Unfortunately, will power alone isn’t enough to break a habit, at least the kind of will power most of us have developed.

NEXT WEEK WE WILL discuss the methods to be used to overcome negative habits and the Yoga method of developing positive ones.

All harmful habits can be broken. There are no exceptions to this principle.

“We first make our habits and then our habits make us.”