The First Aspect of Right Effort

Right speech, action and livelihood provide the foundation because those steps are abstinence from unwholesome activities. But we need to go a little further in terms of preventing the unwholesOME states from arising in our minds. So here we need to exercise wise attention with respect to the different objects of experience which arise. As you've experienced, when our attention is casual or careless then we simply easily fall back into old habit patterns of reactivity.