Conscious Choice: Soft Addictions Can be the Hardest to Break

January 2005 | Body & Mind Health

Soft Addictions Can be the Hardest to Break

by Darlene E. Paris

If you’ve already written a list of New Year’s resolutions, tear it up. Personal growth and development trainer Judith Wright says New Year’s resolutions don’t work. “Resolutions are all about wanting a quick fix. We think in one fell swoop I’m going to fix this thing or that thing. Well, it doesn’t work that way,” she said.

Studies show that people make changes for at least three weeks and then return to their old behavior.

I believe it. Over the years, I’ve tried hard to keep my resolutions. I would write them in big bold letters on a yellow piece of paper and plaster it on my bedroom mirror. I had hoped that when I looked at myself in the mirror each morning, the fluorescent message would remind me of the things I no longer wanted to continue doing and slowly but surely I’d change.

My resolutions were always the same: lose weight, exercise more frequently, and spend less time at work. Initially, I was excited, even diligent, about achieving these goals. But as time progressed, the intricate details of my life became more important than my resolutions. Ultimately, I resolved that my life was OK just the way it was, but later regretted I was unable to change it.

Wright, the author of There Must Be More Than This: Finding More Life, Love and Meaning By Overcoming Your Soft Addictions, gave me insight into why it’s difficult to keep resolutions: “Our old ways of doing things are so much a part of who we think we are that we have difficulty doing something different. We also lack the skills to break these annoying habits.”

Wright calls the habits, routines, compulsive behaviors and thought patterns that keep us from obtaining the life we want soft addictions. They satisfy surface wants, but they don’t satisfy our deeper needs, such as the need to be loved, to be affirmed, to express, or to live a life of purpose.

Soft addictions are seemingly harmless activities like shopping, talking on the phone, flirting, biting fingernails, watching television, checking e-mails and even excessively working out at the gym. There’s nothing really wrong with these activities, but they become harmful to our spirits when they prevent us from experiencing our feelings more fully and evaluating what’s really going on in our lives.

If you’re like me and enjoy setting an intention for your life at the beginning of the year, pinpointing your addictions is important. “Soft addictions are really what making resolutions is all about,” Wright said. “These ruts and routines are what sabotage us from achieving our goals.”

Don’t despair. There’s help for those of us who are determined to recreate our lives. Our addictions may be hard as granite, but we can begin to break them. Wright teaches people how to do just that in seminars and workshops she gives through an organization she directs with her husband, Bob, called the Wright Institute. She also has a Web site (www.judithwright.com) with an interactive program that helps people envision their futures.

“We teach people to become visionaries,” Wright said. New Year’s resolutions work when you have a bigger vision regarding your goals. People say I’m not going to do this anymore, or they say they want to make a shift, but they don’t know why. If you don’t know why you’re doing a certain behavior, resolutions tend not to work.

For example, it’s not enough to say I want to lose weight this year. To focus on losing weight isn’t effective. Instead, ask why you want to lose weight? What is your vision? How do you want to feel in your body?

When you ask those questions, all of a sudden it starts to shift from “I want to lose weight” to a broader vision like, “I want to be more healthy, sensuous and flexible.”

Wright encourages clients to break their visions into daily, weekly or monthly activities. People often set unrealistic goals. They resolve to work out six times a week at the gym, but they’ve been a coach potato for 50 years. For this person, daily workouts aren’t realistic, Wright said.

So she recommends taking smaller steps. “Let’s say someone wants to become more flexible. They might decide to take a dance or yoga class, or even hire a personal trainer at the gym. The first thing they want to do is find out where the nearest yoga studio is in their area. The next step could be to visit the yoga studio and pick up a class schedule. Then the person may want to actually take a class,” she said. What happens over the course of a year is that they’ve taken all the necessary steps to become flexible.

Making resolutions is a way we attempt to solve problems in our lives we really don’t want to analyze. When we turn these resolutions into visions, however, we begin living more consciously, Wright said. But be warned. Change doesn’t happen overnight. Turning our visions into reality can sometimes take more than a year. “It’s not a quick fix, it’s a journey,” Wright said. “We just have to learn to take it step by step.”

Darlene E. Paris is a Chicago-based writer specializing in spiritual matters.

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