Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. As a clinical psychologist now helping people improve their lives

for over 30 years, there's one very common theme that I see pretty much all the time,

not all the time, but almost all the time.

People come in to see me because they're in crisis.

There's something going on that's very upsetting to them and they want my help to figure it out. And after 30 years I've gotten quite good at figuring things out.

So after we put up the fire, I rarely see them again.

But the one thing I've learned about human behavior is human behavior is very

habitual. We are creatures of habit and when we develop these habits, the older we are, the

stronger they become, and whatever we fix will go back to our original

habit.

For example, a friend of mine is a heart surgeon, and he told me once that when he fix his hearts and he's gotten quite good at it because he's been doing it for many years too,

is that he found that within two years or less the people have the same problems again. It's all about habits. We create heart

disease because of our lifestyle sometimes, not totally, but often. And if we don't change

these habits like the way we eat and exercise, we're going to just continue to rebuild that plaque or whatever was in there to cause our heart disease.

In the same way, psychologically, we just revert back to whatever we're used to or whatever

happens we have in place. Even if we change them temporarily we're going to go

back to what we went to. You often see that when people get remarried.

I don't know if you know this, but the stats recently that I read show that 80% of second

marriages fail, where first marriages fail around 50%.

I think what happens there is we tend to yes find someone new but repeating

our old habits it just happens again because you've already pulled the trigger.

It's easy to pull the trigger of divorce again.

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