Welcome to day eight in #Write31Days. Today’s post, like last week Monday’s, is yet again focused on emotions. I took another prompt from The Self-Exploration Journal. It asks what emotions drive me to bad habits.
I have a few self-destructive habits, some of which I engage more regularly in than others. For example, I overeat on average at least once a week, but only self-injure by cutting occasionally. Then there are these little habits that I engage in so often that I barely even notice them anymore, such as nail-biting or most recently teeth-grinding. Just a few minutes ago, my husband asked me to stop grinding my teeth.
Basically, I can be pretty sure that the type of emotional state that drives me to engage in all of these bad habits is stress. Stress is usually thought of as a type of anxiety, but it is not necessarily fear that drives it.
I tend mostly to engage in the little bad habits, like nail-biting or teeth-grinding, when not feeling much of a clear emotion at all. Rather, I tend to be in a state of worry, thinking in circles.
When emotions do reach the point where I notice them, they are pretty close to boiling point already. When this happens I may engage in self-harm behaviors or overeat.
When I look closely at what emotion causes me to engage in these self-destructive behaviors, I see that it is usually a sense of loneliness. Loneliness is not an emotion or so I’m told. At least it isn’t a primary emotion. Sadness is and that’s often what’s underneath this sense of loneliness.
Anger can also drive me to engage in self-destructive habits. Usually though, I am angry at something too minor to matter. The emotion underlying this anger is once again sadness.
What emotions drive you to bad habits?
A Multitude of Musings 
When I’m stressed I engage in a lot of little bad habits like nail bitting or picking, or bitting my lip and such. An emotion that drives me to bigger things is usually anger, when I feel a lot of it I self-injure, or at least feel like doing so. Sometimes it happens to me that I experience overloads of emotions, my explanation of it is that I’ve been suppressing them a lot of the time, particularly those negative ones, and there are times when they come to the surface, sometimes quite out of the blue, and then I also feel very self-destructive and suicidal. But I think that for me anger is the emotion that’s linked to the most of bad habits.
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