Why do so many people overeat, drink too much, smoke or rely on "pills" to keep them going?

Many people use food, drink, cigarettes or pills to help them cope, in the short term, with stress and worry. But as long term measures they don’t really help you cope and they do damage your health. The stress itself may have been produced by personal problems. Perhaps it is social circumstances that make life difficult. But unfortunately it is much harder to improve housing and working conditions than it is to deal with personal worries.

Of course not all poor patterns of living are ways of trying to cope with problems. They may have been picked up – without thinking about them – when you were a child. Or, if they were learnt as a way of coping, the original stress may have gone but the pattern remains as a habit. So far we have avoided calling these patterns habits. This is because most people think of habits as bad and that the person who has the habit should take the blame for what he does. Habits may be “bad” in that they are damaging and difficult to change – but that may be nothing to do with the character of the person concerned. When people do want to change they have the problem that, whatever the reasons were for starting in the first place, habits, once learnt, are extremely difficult to break.