When you need immediate help resisting the temptation to indulge in a vice or addiction, remember three (3) simple words to follow:
Stop. Breathe. Connect.
Immediately say aloud to yourself "Stop!" and take a break from what you're doing at that moment. This helps to break the "trance" we sometimes experience in being tempted to indulge a vice or addiction, and then we are in a better disposition to follow the subsequent steps.
Begin this breathing exercise: Inhale slowly through your nose (or mouth if congested) as deeply as possible, then exhale slowly through your mouth. Repeat for a total of seven (7) deep breaths. As you inhale each time, close your eyes and pray to yourself, "Come Holy Spirit." This calms down your body as you invoke the Holy Spirit for help.
If we suppress our thoughts and feelings about what we're experiencing, we often end up "white-knuckling" through the experience and/or turning inward to self-medicate with a vice or addiction that turns the negative experience into a more comfortable and pleasant experience that actually stunts our intellectual and emotional growth. However, when we connect with someone we trust and tell them about our thoughts and feelings and the experience causing them, we process our intellectual and emotional response in a healthier way and enable ourselves to grow intellectually and emotionally through that experience. The following seven-step process helps us to do exactly that.
Lamentations 3:40 – “Let us search and examine our ways, and return to the Lord!”
2 Corinthians 13:5 – “Examine yourselves to see whether you are living in faith. Test yourselves. Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you? –Unless, of course, you fail the test.”
_____ is patient, _____ is kind. _____ is not jealous, _____ is not pompous, _____ is not inflated, _____ is not rude, _____ does not seek [his] own interests, _____ is not quick-tempered, _____ does not brood over injury, _____ does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. _____ bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Sirach 28:2 – “Forgive your neighbor the wrong done to you; then when you pray, your own sins will be forgiven.”
Matthew 6:12 – “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”
Exodus 14:14 – “The Lord will fight for you; you have only to keep still.”
James 1:19 – “Know this, my dear brothers: everyone should be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath.”
Strive to grow in virtue in addition to resisting immediate temptation to indulge a vice or addiction. Those who fail to strive for growth in virtue will be ill-prepared to resist temptation in the future, “and the last condition of that person is worse than the first.” (Matthew 12:45; Luke 11:26)