Here’s a picture of me and my dad enjoying an ice cream in the Sunshine.

I’ve no intention of stopping having an ice cream in the sunshine because I enjoy it.

But there’s times when we really need to knock things on the head because it’s detrimental to us.

I know I’m pragmatic and my methods are often simplistic but I’ve experimented many times with stopping doing things I enjoy or are habitual to understand what drives me to really do them, what I need to do to override that desire and what I need to do to continue to do so.

In fact in order to do so, I find it very hard to go back to doing those things even though I have no real reason to stop doing them after the experiment.

Something I’ve found that works for me when I’m tempted to do something I’m attempting to stop and temptation is creeping in is to ask myself s really simply question.

So what? Or when I’m really going for it ‘so fucking what!’

So for example when we are tempted by something we say to ourselves ‘I want Xyz’. We behave like a child or teenager. I want, I want. And we try and solve or resist it from that mind set. We try to solve it from the position of the child. No wonder we give in so easily. Instead try becoming the parent who’s fed up with the winging and says ‘so what that you want that thing, what off it? Who cares what you’d rather?’ I know this sounds simple but there’s method in the madness.

By changing identity, by challenging the emotion we break what is known as ‘the cycle of dysfunctional behaviour’ which works by first thinking of something, then fantasising about it and then acting on or trying to resist it. But by the time we fantasise about eating cake it’s hard to resist.

But we all know times when just as we’ve thought ‘I’m desperate for a coffee, I can’t function, that the boss comes in and barks an order we jump to attention, do what we are told and forget all about the coffee until much later when we think ‘fuck I never got that coffee after all’ (we never go as far as recognising we didn’t die after all from not having it!)

The point is, to stop anything, we need to find ways to break patterns, to be the boss or the parent and not the child.