Ditching the old scripts as the new habit sticks

Photo by Emma Simpson on Unsplash

DAY 4 of any new regimen, and the initial grit begins to wear off as you begin to settle in on the ‘drudgery’ of what you’re missing out on. Sacrifice bites. It costs. None of us really like the sort of change that involves loss — even those who normally thrive on change.

What is tucked in and underneath the drudgery are the re-emergence of those old scripts that have worn deep neurological grooves in our mind — the ruts of habit.

For me, it’s ‘Go on, you can get away with that,’ and ‘You’ll make up for that later…’

Old scripts of bad habits are the snug language of our comfort zone — the habits that have served us destructively well, in that such habits are effective in sustaining us along the road to reaching wrong destinations in life. New habits grip when we ditch the old script.

We know the old script is winning us over when we begin to act in old ways. And then as we interrogate what precedes the action, we notice an unconscious thought or three that hatches a plan — to do the old action of the habit we wish to break.

Awareness of old scripts is one strategy we need to develop. Another is to replace that old script with a new one, and to do it proactively, which is something we need to practice with repetitiveness and regularity, to put the past behind us.

When we plan to make change that involves sacrifice we need to anticipate the moments when we feel loss bite.

Creating a new habit is a challenge,

to overcome the old habit as it grips,

one thing we must endeavour to do,

is ditch and replace the old scripts.