Three Mental Habits That Consume All Your Energy
Mental habits often arise and are maintained without you even realizing it and they frequently consume energy that they shouldn’t. Sometimes, it’s due to what you’ve learned over time, and at others the influence of your environment or your beliefs and personality type.
Indeed, you often acquire mental habits that are destructive or harmful, but they’re so automatic that you don’t even notice them. This means that they end up conditioning the schemas you have of the world, your attitudes, and your behavioral repertoires.
When this happens, you might end up building a life with harmful foundations. They’re the kinds that, in many cases, set off chain reactions that give rise to feelings of great discomfort or dissatisfaction. In fact, some mental habits consume a good part of your vital energy. Next, we’ll talk about the three most significant negative mental habits.
“ Being aware of our prejudices, the degree of responsibility we have, or in which areas we’re too comfortable speaks about the quality of our life.”
-Angel Rull-
1. Avoiding responsibility
The mental habit of not committing or leaving everything for later is one that consumes excessive energy. It’s expressed in the tendency to adopt a passive role in everything connected to responsibility. It applies in work scenarios, but also in romantic and family relationships, and even wider societal contexts.
In this case, you act according to what others demand or do. You believe that you can’t resist or oppose anything that the environment imposes on you. At the bottom of this, lies a lack of responsibility for yourself.
This mental habit steals your energy because, at the end of the day, your efforts and goals are oriented towards foreign realities. What you have to give is given based on what others ask. You don’t focus on your own goals and your dreams vanish into thin air.
2. Not knowing what you want
Planning actions looking for the wrong reinforcer can also become a negative mental habit. It often occurs when you try to obtain social reinforcement by sacrificing your desires or the satisfaction of your real needs. As in the previous case, you neglect your own needs.
Deep down, almost everyone knows what they really want. However, perhaps you’re afraid to confess because, to do so, would generate personal responsibility. You may also be afraid of failure or feel that your own needs don’t count.
Whatever the case, continual doubt and hesitation steal a great deal of your vital energy. In fact, sometimes, the process of deciding or choosing which way to go is more arduous and tiring than the action of carrying it out. If you never seem to know what you want, you’ll experience many situations when you feel emotionally and intellectually exhausted.
3. Lack mentality
If you have a lack mentality, you see yourself as deficient. A feeling of worthlessness conditions both your actions and your life.
This mental habit can end up translating into behaviors such as passivity, lack of optimism, constant fear, and lack of initiative. If you exhibit this type of attitude, the situations that follow aren’t usually particularly rewarding. In addition, it usually ends up generating a vicious circle of behavior.
What happens is you feed this limitation that, in reality, only exists in your mind. At the same time, by leading a life with limitations as a starting point, you have a poor view of the future and the possibility of you improving it is reduced. This frequently causes feelings of discomfort that you pay for with emotional energy.
You can counteract negative mental habits simply by being aware of them. Firstly, you must detect these ideas or beliefs that you have about yourself. Then, rationalize them and counter them with positive habits.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
- Camargo, A. M. (2018). Hábitos, reflexión y estados mentales intencionales. Revista Internacional de Sociología, 76(1), e081-e081.
- Jager, W. (2003). Breaking bad habits: a dynamical perspective on habit formation and change. Human Decision-Making and Environmental Perception–Understanding and Assisting Human Decision-Making in Real Life Settings. Libor Amicorum for Charles Vlek, Groningen: University of Groningen.