Take One Day at a Time
August 31st, 2007No matter what it is you are trying to achieve or overcome, a good rule of thumb is to take one day at a time. Sometimes by trying to get ahead of yourself by projecting your thoughts into the future, the task at hand can sometimes seem too overwhelming for you to deal with but by taking one day at a time you never need to focus your energies any further a field than the day in front of you.
Taking one day at a time can be an especially wise move for anyone dealing with an addiction. When you are addicted to drugs, alcohol or anything else, your thoughts never seem too far from your addiction. You might be just about to finish work and be thinking how easy it would be to go for a drink as soon as work is over and how good it would make you feel. Then those thoughts come up in your mind that you have to be strong and go straight home after work since you are committed this time to giving up drinking. At this point you start contemplating how on earth will you ever be able to stay away from alcohol for the rest of your life, it is just too difficult a task, so you decide, what the hell and you go for a drink.
The above example is a perfect illustration of the mind games that go on inside the mind of a person suffering from any type of addiction. They often end up giving into their addiction since they cannot take one day at a time, instead they look at their addiction as an all encompassing power that seems to be out of their control but this is not the case. The addiction can be much easily controlled and contained by simply taking one day at a time.
Even people with the most chronic of addictions could probably go at least one day without giving in to their addiction if they knew they were to receive something of great value following just one day of abstinence. It might still be extremely difficult to give up for a single day but if they knew for sure that on the following day they were going to receive something that would make them enormously happy, almost anyone with an addiction would stop for one day. It is for this reason why almost anyone can overcome an addiction. If you can stop for one day you can stop for two days and so on.
When you have an addiction the best way to deal with this on a mental level is to dismiss trying to give up your addition permanently but to focus on giving up for just one day and by doing this you are effectively taking one day at a time. We all live day by day, we cannot jump forward one month or one year, we can only take one day at a time. This is the case for the happiest people on the planet and for those suffering from addiction. As each day passes and you manage to abstain from what ever it is that you are addicted to you will gain some positive momentum in a direction leading away from addiction and the longer you stay on this path the easier it gets.
Eventually and it may take some time, your addiction will be just another bad habit you dealt with and which made you a stronger person for the experience. Never returning to that bad habit is only ever about taking one day at a time even when new or old problems arise and you may feel tempted. All you ever have to remember is to take one day at a time, you never need to look past the day in front of you, that next day will come when it comes and you can face it then, no need to face it any earlier. Taking one day at a time also puts you into a positive habit of enjoying the moment when you finally overcome your addiction instead of always living in the past or the future.
It doesn’t matter what you are facing in life, whether it be the break up of a relationship, the death of someone you care about, losing your job or overcoming an addiction, why make the process harder on yourself unnecessarily, just take one day at a time and eventually you will see some light at the end of the tunnel. Instead of trying to figure out how to deal with the following year, it is so much easier to just stay focused on today.
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August 31st, 2007 at 5:42 am
This is great advice, John, and applies to building good habits as well. Telling yourself, “Just for today, I’m going to exercise,” seems so much more achievable than, “I’m going to exercise daily for the next 45 years!”
September 29th, 2007 at 6:04 pm
[…] that is all your goal will ever be, just 1 kg at a time. Don’t look at the big picture, just take one day at a time and imagine how much better you will look if you can lose just 1 kg per week. If you need to lose […]