Habits are beliefs we are convicted of on a very deep level, which we act out without thinking about them. Sometimes habits are good, but often they are bad, and destructive. Why do we engage in clearly self-destructive habits? It is because we are governed not quite so much by a simple "survival-of-the-fittest", but by our desires -- among which the desire to survive is only one of many desires, and by no means the strongest!
If we are engaging in bad habits, it is because somewhere along the line we learned to trust the desire or the belief that made a given activity attractive to us, and worthy of our trust and our imitation of it. The reason why we cannot drop a habit even though we recognize it (now) to be bad for us, is because beliefs are by nature much stronger than mere thoughts. Beliefs, like the habits they eventuate, are convictions we have that run sometimes very deep.
I am not an addictions counselor by any means (and if I mention addiction, of course this means more than mere stereotypes: addictions are just those habits which our conscious thoughts have decided are not healthy -- which is why it is essential, in my understanding, for addicts to admit to themselves that the addiction is indeed an addiction, and not a conviction worthy of belief), but I believe that one very good step to getting rid of a bad habit is to try and remember what attracted you to that habit in the first place, if you can, and to think about that, AND TALK ABOUT IT WITH OTHERS, and rework it and eventually the habit will loosen its hold on you.
But talking about it with others (preferably others you think of as mature and having integrity - i.e. the right others) is something I think no one will disagree with.
