Breaking Bad Habits

             You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. (Galatians 5:13)

 

            This verse happens to have come up in Biblegateway.com on a day when I’m reading about the body/flesh in Renovation of the Heart. One of the points that Professor Willard makes is that the body can and does learn. It is a habit builder. That’s why you don’t consciously have to think about every move your body makes when it’s driving a car, or cutting apples, or walking across a room. Much of what the body has learned to do has low levels of reward for it. For most of us, driving a car, cutting apples, or walking across a room don’t measure up to our guilty pleasure, whether those are pornography, eating, using alcohol or other drugs (including caffeine,) or even anger and attention-seeking behaviors.

            This is why replacing bad habits with good habits is so difficult. Your mind and will may team up and insist that the body and feelings get with the program, but even if you stop doing the bad thing, unless you replace its reward with an equally powerful reward for the body and feelings, the habit will remain work, and the body and feelings will only too willingly go back to the bad habit, even years later, because they remember the pleasure. And if you fall back into the bad habit, it’s even harder to break. Knowing how to eat right doesn’t make it any easier to break the renewed habit of eating wrong, because the body and emotions know that it means giving up its rewards, and the reward of being healthy and strong isn’t much of a weapon to use against “But we wants it… oh, my precious.”

            But once again, Scripture gives us a clue that science has only rediscovered in the past 40 years or so. According to psychologists, meaningfully helping others can produce a “helper’s high” that improves mental health, generates longevity, and feels good. Helping others – seeking good for them – is the definition of love. So the second commandment (loving our neighbors as ourselves) generates a reward. Loving ourselves properly also does so unless we teach ourselves that it doesn’t measure up to the rewards of indulgence.

            And this explains why it’s seemingly so important to me to report on what I’ve done. It gives me a second, but lower, shot of the high, especially if others respond lovingly. This is why we need support groups. When they don’t, there are two alternatives – to stop doing the thing that helps me, or to find a reward in either proving them wrong or “showing them” just how impressive I can be in my “obsession.”

This is also why some people get so bound up in codependently helping others. They may be doing harm to the person they think they’re helping, but to them, they’re helping, and not only do they want the reward of that, but the reward of having others appreciate their helping. It makes it especially difficult when those “helped” don’t respond as expected. And studies have shown that those “helped” often don’t feel helped – they feel manipulated, imposed upon, to be demeaned. The helpers are so caught up in their helping that they don’t bother to find out whether their help is needed or helpful. Of course, it must be! Dog-gone-it, they’re helping. How could what feels so good to them be anything other than helpful?

This happens even if the helpers mean well. There are stories of people sending clothing to help those devastated by Hurricane Katrina – and the clothing being thrown out as useless, and stories of the textile trade in East Africa being negatively affected by clothing being sent to help the poor, or chicken farmers in south Asia being put out of business because people ship eggs to the area.

            This is why we aren’t to forsake assembling together. This is why we need to go to church and be involved with others in the church. This is why we need to study Scripture together to learn what it teaches. This is why we need to be wise about our helping, but it may also be one reason why Paul was inspired to write that our alternative to living out of the flesh is serving one another. It is the serving one another that provide the positive response that defeats our addiction to the flesh, as long as we are wise and careful about it.