What The Bible Taught Me About Addiction
If you kick a bad habit, lock the door. Otherwise, it will return with its friends.
I have battled nicotine addiction for more than nine years.
It has not been an easy task. I have noticed that at times I can quit and sustain for a long time. However, if I break and give in to the bad habit once, the addiction tends to multiply itself.
In my first attempt quitting, I went a few weeks without chewing tobacco. I felt great. But then I let my guard down...
When I ended up chewing again, the addiction was much worse than it started. I was chewing now twice the amount I had before.
This happened again and again. The cycle of quitting and relapsing would continue, and each time, it became worse and more extreme. In fact, it got so bad that at one point, I was chewing as much as I can per day, which is an extreme acceleration from my original problem of one chew per day…
As I was reading the bible the other day, I came across a few lines that perfectly depicted this cycle. And better yet, it gives the secret to ending the cycle…
When an evil spirit goes out of a person, it travels over dry country looking for a place to rest. If it can’t find one, it says to itself, ‘I will go back to my house.’ So it goes back and finds the house empty, clean, and all fixed up.
Then it goes out and brings along seven other spirits even worse than itself, and they come and live there. So when it is all over, that person is in worse shape than at the beginning. This is what will happen to the evil people of this day.
— Matthew 12: 43–45
I banished the evil spirit, the bad habit, many times, but it saw that I had not changed and each time, it came back. I was just a clean empty house waiting to be lived in. So it came back home to roost and brought its friends, which multiplied the problem…
This made my addiction worse. It created negative thought loops of self-doubt, broke my confidence, enables other bad habits like drinking, welcomed procrastination with open arms, disregarded the importance of money, and skewed my life priorities. The bad habit and its friends were having quite the party and my expense.
But here is the really cool part…
Your body is your own, and those evil spirits, those addictions, those bad habits, and poor decisions are not you! They only live within you. And just like a tenant who does not pay rent, you may evict them like the landlord you are.
And even better than that, once you have evicted these bad habits, you have to make sure you bring in new tenants, so those evicted have no home to return to.
Let me make this as simple and as clear as possible…
If you quit a bad habit but do not change your lifestyle to eliminate its triggers or replace the trigger with new habit loops, the bad habit will always have a home to come back to. And as long as it sees that the “house” is unoccupied, It comes back with a vengeance.
However, if you quit the bad habit and replace it with a new and better habit, one that serves you and keeps you strong, when that bad habit comes back and knocks at the door, it will find that a new habit has occupied the house. It will have no power to enter as long as the good habit stays in the house. And you will be able to walk away from giving in to an old bad habit with ease.
The moral here…
Out with the bad and in with the good. If you do not bring in the good, then the bad has not really left.
With Love,
Travis
