How to Break Habits and find Freedom?

Every year at end of December a huge amount of talk and thought goes around us on the most simple and toughest thing to follow "The New Year Resolution". We have been making a whole lot of New Year Resolutions and breaking almost all of them year on year. This has become a yearly phenomenon and will continue so.

I always used think "Why is it so difficult for me to keep my new year resolution?" and every time I get the same excuses of not having enough time, not having enough money or not having enough support etc...
When I analysed this yearly routine of making and eventually braking resolutions, I realized that every year my resolutions have been to either change my old habits which I thought was not on par with my expectations or to create a new one. On further contemplation the realization hit me is that changing old habits is not something which happens in a day, it is a long and tedious process.

So I set on my journey to discover what exactly an habit is, how does one cultivate it and what are its characteristics. What I found out so far is:

1. Habit start like any other activity
Any activity that we do in our day to day life can be turned into an habit if it's repeated for a long period of time. Initially when we start a activity, like learning a Bicycle, we tend to concentrate on every aspect and movement of our body. As we keep practicing and repeating this activity our body gets into an Auto Pilot mode and keeps doing it without much consciousness from us. After some time this happens even without our consciousness, now it's a full blown habit which has embedded deep inside ourselves.

2.  Habits are at various levels
Our habits can be at our body level, mind level and even our emotional level.
Any physical activity when repeated and performed over and over will become a habit for our body. Not much of mind will be involved in it. For example riding a Bicycle, playing basketball or running.
A thought process when repeated again and again will become a habit of our mind. Like if we keep on showing our kid a dark room and tell her that it's a very dangerous place, and we do it every day she will start associating dark room or darkness with dangerous. This is how various though patterns of ours starts establishing.
Similarly our emotions gets habituated when we are exposed to similar kind of situations repeatedly. Like in the above mentioned case, the child start feeling fear as soon as she sees a dark room or area.

3. It takes considerable amount of time for a habit to be established
Any habit will require repetitive involvement for a considerable amount of time for itself to go deep inside us. Habits at physical level can be established in short time like 45 days, whereas habits at mind and emotional level will take more time a minimum of 6 months.

4. Habits in Auto Pilot (Unconscious) mode
Once a habit get established it start working automatically. More established the habit more unconsciously we do it. Unconsciousness is the strength of habits, the more unconsciously we perform our activities the stronger our habits become and for difficult it will be for us to change it.

Now how to change a Habit or Create a new one.

We can simply understand the key characteristics of habits and use the same to change them. By using the above mentioned characteristics we can change or create a habit by following the below given steps.

1. Start doing the old activity (habit) which you want to change with complete consciousness.Once consciousness enters into the habit it will loose its strength.
2. Do this conscious activity for a minimum of 45 days(for other levels of mind and emotion it will take more time) to break the old habit.
3. Then start establishing the new habit.
4. Continue the new activity for a minimum  45 days(for other levels of mind and emotion it will take more time) to deeply establish the new habit.
5. Now we have completed the cycle of breaking the old habit and creating a new one.

If we can go through this cycle successfully once we will  have a lot of freedom in choosing what kind of habits we want to let in and what we want to keep out.

By this we can find what is called real FREEDOM as we in turn will become the rulers of our body, mind and heart instead of the other way around, which is the current reality.

I wish that all of us will find true FREEDOM in our lives.

JKS