Minor addictions can be classified as poor / obsessive habits. It does not have to have a chemical element to it, just a kind of a “fetish” for a certain action or experience.

Minor addictions, for example, are – checking your email every 10 minutes; zapping through the 3,000 channels on your TV aimlessly (wasting time but flexing your thumb); hearing the news every hour or half an hour; going to the same website again and again instead of finishing a task (unless it’s NLPWeekly.com, then it’s quite alright) and so on.

By minor addictions, I mean those little obsessive habits that get through to you without conscious decision; those time wasters, energy drainers, seductive actions that hold you back on your promises instead of pushing you upwards. These are what Jim Rohn would call, “errors in judgement, repeated every day (=failure formula)”.

So what I’m sharing here is something I started doing a long time ago. I did forget using it more than a few times in my life but recently I’ve actually started making a list of “errors in judgement” that I repeat and testing their inactivation or re-habituation to notice the effect on everything else.

So the idea to accomplish a re-habituation of a minor addiction is simple – consciously organize it, so that it would be somewhat uncomfortable to perform the habit. It might work on first trial already or it might be that you’d grow “comfortable” into that uncomfortable organization, which again would make the minor addiction easy and comfortable to perform…

In such a case, you again consciously organize it so that it would be much more uncomfortable to “make an error in judgement” related to that bad habit.

For example, let’s say that you’re addicted to checking your email account every 3.5 minutes. Most likely, you have the toolbar or a fast bookmark that allows you to go directly into the mail box. Remove it. Make it so that you’d have to type “http://www.gmail.com” or Hotmail or whatever it is, in the address bar. I’ve tried to do so myself right now, and it’s A-N-N-O-Y-I-N-G.

A more advanced look at the “check email every 3.5 minutes – error in judgement, repeated” – is to install one of those notifiers, a software that runs in the background and notifies you when you get a new email. Google is offering such for free, and most likely there are other programs for other email services as well. But, if you can, make it so that the program checks emails only once an hour or better – only twice a day. Unless your work is dependent on emails, you really have no urgent matters to take care of through that medium. In fact, if it’s really urgent, the person would call you…

I’ve done that for watching TV. There are just way too many good programs (in some seasons) to watch… so I did the best thing I thought about and I removed the TV from the house. I don’t own a TV for more than 6 years now … Ok, the TV addict would say, No Problem! there’s Youtube…