Supplanting Bad Habits

I've done some studying on how to develop self-control, and I found a reminder of something that I think I knew all along; I just had forgotten. One important step to overcoming temptations (or "impulses," as some of the guides called them) is to replace them with something else, something positive. If you have a bad thought, replace it with a good thought. If you want to kick a bad habit, develop a good habit instead.

This, if you think that middle names mean anything about a person, should be practically second nature to me. My middle name is James, which, according to the dictionary in our living room,  means "Supplanter" in Hebrew. To supplant something means to remove it either to replace it with something else or by replacing it with something else. I need to supplant my bad habits with good ones. So, while I try not to do the things I don't want to do, I'm going to try to do other things instead.

Replacing bad actions with good actions makes a lot of sense to me as a method of increasing your self control. Before doing much research on this topic, I had already figured that one way to increase self-control was to consciously make difficult decisions. I thought that this would mean deliberately subjecting oneself to, and then resisting, temptation. While this can be done fairly safely through fasting, it turns out that a person gets  plenty of temptation to train against whenever they try to do anything good.

Developing good habits and gaining positive skills are not in Satan's plan against us, so he consistently fights our efforts to do good. Mastering a skill is usually already difficult, but it becomes even more so when the adversary strikes us with waves of lethargy.

Fortunately, there are ways to fight off the enemy's attempts to halt our self-improvement, but, to be effective, the methods we use to fight the adversary will have to reflect the ways in which he fights us. This will include studying the behavior we wish to cease and examining which events and emotions led up to it. At this level, our methods of fighting temptation will have to be largely individualized, but many of the broad strokes remain true.

For self-improvement to take place, it is essential to deliberately replace bad things with good ones. When left alone, our hearts, minds, and hands tend to follow the path of least resistance, which in this case means continuing to pursue the bad habits we're trying to overcome. In order to more effectively resist temptation, we have to give our hearts, minds, and hands something else to focus on. It won't work to try to stop doing bad things by doing nothing; it's much more effective to force yourself to do something else instead.