I love talking about breaking free from old habits. I’m old enough now to proudly wear several “I broke free” badges, and I distinctly recall how uncomfortable it felt.
You’re pretty much pushing against everything that feels familiar and replacing it with brand new habits that your body and mind scream, “No, thank you!” to.
Stay with it. Notice these 7 feelings of discomfort as you start the process of breaking free, and break free anyway!
Old habits don’t have to die hard, especially the more aware you are.
7 uncomfortable feelings that are a normal part of breaking free from old habits:
1. That weird void of nothing that pops up where the habit used to be.
Breaking an old habit can sometimes feel a little like losing a relationship, and that’s because both leave behind a void where something familiar used to be.
Take the end of a relationship as an example.
You used to get up on the weekends together and drink coffee in bed. You’d tackle jobs around the house, take trips to the supermarket, argue over what takeaway to order, and spend evenings on the sofa – all those little routines that slowly become part of a shared life.
And then it’s gone.
Then the weekends started to resemble you refusing to get out of bed or skipping breakfast and eating cereal for lunch and dinner. You feel empty, and you have all this time to fill.
You don’t want to fill it; you want to fester.
It’s a similar feeling (but obviously on a different scale) when you break a habit.
You’ve become so used to filling a particular space in your day with that behavior that when it’s gone, you’re left staring at a strange, uncomfortable emptiness.
The habit may not have been good for you, and it was given up for a reason (much like a relationship), but it took up your time, attention, and energy.
And now that it’s gone, your brain keeps searching for something to fill the gap it left behind.
This is where new activities, hobbies, routines, and distractions can help you resist temptations, fill the void, and form new, better habits.
2. The urge to drift back into your old habits because they’re easy and familiar.
Stop right there.
Familiarity doesn’t mean good. Easy doesn’t mean good. Safe doesn’t even always mean good.
Sure, old habits may have served you at some point in your life. We take them on to get by or through something, or they subconsciously become a part of us. But we change, people change, and so do our situations and circumstances.
We realize, in fact, that our habits are no longer doing us any good at all, and we need to shed them.
We want to shed them.
Yet the pull back to the easy and familiar is real and strong.
Research shows that it actually takes around 12 weeks for a new habit to form – much more than the highly advertised, but mythical, 21 days we’ve all read about.
The brain needs half a chance, right? You can’t just tell it, “This is my life now!” and expect it not to want to revert back to what it’s known for so long.
Give it time. Don’t give in to the easiness of what you yearn to outgrow.
3. The doubt you feel when you wonder if it’s even going to be worth it.
Oh, us humans love a bit of doubt, don’t we? Life can’t go too well for too long before we start to wonder if we will make it, achieve it, hit that target, or whether we should bother at all.
Why is that? When we talk to each other, we are the first to offer support. Take marathons, for example. We stand at the side of the race, cheering everyone on.
“You can do it!” “Keep going!” “You’ve got this!” “Only two more miles!”
Imagine if we shouted, “Why are you bothering?” “You look tired!” “Is it really worth the effort?” “Aren’t you hungry?” “Maybe you should just give up?”
We’d be planting doubt into those runners, and we wouldn’t do it, so why do we talk to ourselves in that way?
Never is this truer than when we’re trying to establish a new habit.
If we’re trying to break free from old habits so we can form new ones, we need to talk to ourselves like those new habits matter.
Eventually, it will be worth it. It has to be if those habits are something you’re willing to change your life for. Stay strong on the days when doubt inevitably kicks in, and don’t allow it to rewrite the narrative for you.
4. The impatience of wanting to feel good right away.
“I’ve started to eat overnight oats for breakfast instead of five pastries, and it’s been three days now. Why don’t I feel good?”
“I have given up half my screen time per day. It’s been two days, and I am just bored and frustrated.”
I get it. You have just given your old habit a firm chop, and you don’t feel any better for it. That is frustrating, particularly in this day and age.
We live in a world where we don’t have to retain any information because we can just Google what we want to know or ask our home devices. We don’t have to rewind cassettes or videotapes anymore. We can click and collect. We can get next-day deliveries. We can get takeout within ten minutes of ordering.
We aren’t patient anymore. Our tolerance has tanked, and we want everything right away, including feeling good right after that first ginger shot or early night.
But growth, unlike streaming films, does not happen immediately.
So take some time to adjust, because if you don’t, you will not grow. What’s more, as cliched as it is, you’ll miss out on the journey because you’re so focused on the destination.
The journey is where you grow and learn – don’t underestimate it.
5. The grief you feel when you realize you ‘should’ve done this years ago’ and will never get that time back.
It’s a bittersweet time, isn’t it? You break free from a habit that was detrimental to you, and the feeling good part of that makes you feel uncomfortable.
“Why didn’t I do this sooner?” “How much time did I waste?” “Why does this hurt so much?”
I want to ask you to be kind to yourself. We don’t just grieve people who die; we grieve situations that we lose, people who are alive, things in life that didn’t go to plan. It all matters, and it all counts.
I call it the ‘Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda’ effect. It’s all great in hindsight, and it doesn’t serve you to dwell there too long, but it is a natural part of the process to mourn time you wasted.
But remember, who’s to say if you broke free two years ago that it would’ve worked out anyway? None of us has a crystal ball, and we simply cannot predict how things would, or would not, have turned out.
So feel your feelings, but don’t get stuck in them. You’ve made the change now, and now is the only time you have any control over.
6. The feeling of not recognizing who you’re becoming because that person is new.
Different is not strictly good, nor bad; it’s just different.
If you’re inviting change into your life, then I applaud you. Breaking free from old habits feels like shedding a skin that no longer serves you. The person underneath is fresh and new, and you won’t totally recognize them.
That’s okay. The reason it doesn’t feel comfortable is probably that you’re walking new ground, forming new patterns, and your brain is going, “What is going on here?!”
Part of the process means sitting with that, and as crazy as it sounds, making friends with this new person.
Remember, a butterfly doesn’t panic because it was once a caterpillar; it just flies.
7. The feeling of vulnerability that comes when you make new choices for yourself because you don’t yet know the outcome.
You’re weighing up the pros and cons of your new journey, but you aren’t moving. You’re afraid of what lies ahead if you say yes, as much as if you say no. Your stress levels skyrocket, and guess what? You miss opportunities.
It’s called analysis paralysis.
Not knowing the outcome of breaking free from old habits and forming new ones shouldn’t mean you freeze on the spot and decide not to move at all. If I did that, I wouldn’t be writing this, and you wouldn’t be reading it.
Being vulnerable means accepting that not every choice you make will be perfect, including breaking free from old habits. If success were always guaranteed, you wouldn’t be feeling so uncomfortable.
Take it step by step, remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and never forget that anything worth having is worth making a few mistakes for.
The rest will fall into place as you get used to making new choices, and make them a part of this new life you’re so keen and ready to carve out.
Final thoughts…
If you’re trying to break free from old habits, the chances are they aren’t good ones.
Nobody says, “You know what? I should smoke and drink more!” or “I would feel so much better if I stopped exercising and banned fruit and vegetables from my diet!”
To let go of what you’ve grown so used to can be really uncomfortable, even if you know those habits are not adding value to your life.
The process of any change is messy and chaotic until the dust settles.
The question I have for you is:
Are you prepared to wait for that dust to settle in order to have a better life?
I hope you already know the answer.
