Self-improvement

Some time ago I quit smoking. Nothing in particular prompted me. I was just tired of feeling guilty about it. Now I have one less thing that bothers me about me. In fact, I have gained one thing to like about me. I like the simple fact that I am a non-smoker.  When I go for a job interview or have a health check for example I am happy to say that I don’t smoke.  I regard giving up the habit as an improvement, which I am often conscious of and the feeling I have of self betterment is what keeps away any temptation to smoke again.

In retrospect I wonder why I did not give it up much sooner. Why did it take so many attempts over so many years when the benefits were so clearly apparent?

I don’t think addiction to nicotine is the answer entirely. I think it has more to do with leaving behind some aspect of who I perceived myself to be and being a smoker was a part of it. My best friends smoked. A great number of artists, writers and philosophers smoked. It was something that people I wanted to be like and be liked by did. In the end smoking became really difficult to give up (even though I knew it was bad for me) because it meant becoming someone slightly different to the person I had grown used to being.

The curious thing now is that despite the fact that I enjoy my new non-smoking self, I am just as reluctant to make other similarly positive changes. For instance, I know that drinking 10 to 15 cups of coffee a day cannot be good for me but I keep doing it anyway. I could quite easily drink the same amount of green tea, which I also enjoy, and actually benefit my health in the process - but I don’t.  I have resigned myself to being a “coffeeholic”. Sometimes I even joke about it, but the truth is I wish I could just have a cup in the morning like my colleagues at work and leave it at that.

I also have a tendency to eat too much. If there is a box of biscuits in the cupboard say, I can’t relax until I have finished every last one. Then I feel guilty about it and berate myself. The lack of control has left me with a flabby gut that I am not happy about, but not even that can motivate me to change my eating habits. It’s perplexing. The only conclusion I can draw is that it is difficult to change ingrained tendencies because in essence it involves changing who I am accustomed to being.  

What really concerns me about the difficulty I have making changes as simple as drinking less coffee is the comparative impossibility of making profound changes to who I am. If I don’t have the ability to have two biscuits instead of twenty, how am I going to resist the far more serious urge to be lazy and unproductive? These are the kind of things that don’t just make me feel guilty but worthless. I need to change them.

As such, from today, I endeavor to give up anything that does not contribute to my sense of wellbeing or self worth. I cannot think of a more obvious way of improving myself. I’ll start by changing the small things like fixing my diet, which will give me the fortitude to tackle the big things like being more productive.  In the process I’m sure to find a bit more to like about myself.