This past month I cut out my bad habits, including going to bed late and waking up rushing to work, I now have a sleep routine/schedule every night, I also stopped hanging out with two toxic friends.
I gave up alcohol too, it wasn’t a habit, I drank twice a month, just decided to cut it out all together.
Funny thing is, its not until I stopped doing these things where I realized how bad I truly felt doing these things, whats the reasoning behind this? Is it just my brain remembering how bad I felt then compared to how good I feel now?
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This could be a couple of things. Perspective is the top one. Sometimes, you need to take a step back and out of a situation for some time to actually form a more unbiased view of the reality. While reality is what it is, you don’t perceive reality. You perceive what your brain is told your eyes saw, what your brain is told your ears heard, etc, and then it’s up to your brain to interpret accurately and without bias or lying. And lies are a big thing, all humans lie, and the majority of our lies are to ourselves, internally. So you may be misperceiving the situation in the moment, or lying and making excuses to defend your actions…. You move away from the situation where you no longer need to continue to lie in defense, maybe the truth shows up a bit more.
Also having a rested and sober mind helps! You mentioned you fixed your sleep, you cut the little drinking you were doing. Both of those, and possibly other healthy habits you are forming, they are helping your mind get more clear and accurate in perception. Sleep is the bigger item here since it sounds like u weren’t a heavy drinker. People seriously understand how lack of sleep fucks you up, and mental health is a huge aspect of it that is overlooked.
Also, you have bias the other way too, and this can be negative. You already decided those items you changed are bad, you already decided to cut “toxic” friends. So you already judged those items and made a decision. So now your mind can be lying to you the other way, you tell yourself life is so much better now as an excuse to defend your changes. New addicts get this mentality too, like they unlocked some new cheatcode to life, like they were a stupid “square” before but now they know the way… they are just defending their addiction choices at that point, and later their view changes
I wonder that a lot too. My father in law sleeps early, stretches every day, walks every day and east healthy. But the dude drinks like its the last day on earth every day.
Because the human brain isn’t rational, it is rationalizing. We make lots of decisions quickly in the moment without real thought and then our brain invents reasons to justify it after the fact.
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