Break up a bad habbit

I’m not sure who the experts are. Depends.

If it’s alcoholism or smoking, 30 days or 90 days or 360 days won’t help much I believe. It’s not about will power, an addiction is a coping mechanism, and it has triggers. Example: see tiger -> lit cigarette -> feel better. Now, the tiger is false, it’s just a poster, but you need to find out why you were triggered by the tiger in the poster, which means you associate a painful emotion from the past with this trigger (tiger), hid in your subconscious and you’re repressing it - unknowingly, unconsciously - because your brain runs away from pain. Relive, re-experience in your own mind the painful emotion and where it comes from and then your addiction will be gone, because there’s no trigger... triggered anymore, no more pain to be repressed and to seek soothing.

I was successful with this approach on four addictions: smoking, drinking, PMO, compulsive nail biting.

 

I don't think length of time is the only factor to consider. There's also a question of whether we necessarily need to be filled with habits and just displace the bad ones with good ones. Mindfulness in it's essence is about responding to life from awareness rather than habit.

 

I went 53 days and I still went back to my old habits and I'm not even addicted to watching porn.

 

A lot of us are still working on it. I've had 6 months before, and in many ways I think I'm doing better now than I was back then. One streak I was pushing through with aggression and anger and that's not the way, maybe in very short term acute relapse prevention but not for maintaining any long term sobriety - the anger is itself a lack of sobriety.

The thing is in my experience it is not a matter of how long - it's what you do with that time. I would say the assumption that it can be standardized to a number of days has to go. Besides, suppose someone genuinely did kick the habit for good and they have a number of how many days - that's just for them - for you is another story. We are not standardized machines.

If we learn more as we go along, one day now is worth more than one day when we first started because of the benefit of our experience.

Look at it this way man: If you can do it faster than most people wouldn't you want to know how to do that?? I say if any other self improvement stuff can help go for it. You may not have a ruler for how much faster it can help you with quitting PMO but if you know it's going to help why not do it?