There is some irony contained in the lines of stanzas one and two. The speaker addresses some other person, describing their erroneous expectation that he is safe because he's in his room. This seems logical, right? A person should be relatively safe while within the protective walls of their own room, as we often think of our bedrooms as places of sanctuary. However, the speaker tells us, "I'm picking me apart again," letting us know that the danger actually comes from within. He isn't safe, even in his room, because it is the things inside him that seem to "wound" him. Here, expectation and reality differ, creating irony.
In stanzas four and five, the speaker repeats the opening words "I don't know" three times, using a device called anaphora . Anaphora is a specific type of refrain where the speaker repeats words or phrases at the beginning of lines. The...
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repetition of this particular phrase—"I don't know"—draws further attention to the speaker's confused state of mind (that he identifies at the end of stanza three).
It also seems possible that in the line "Clutching my cure," the speaker is describing a method of suicide, using a metaphor to compare the thing that will kill him to something that will save him: a cure. The speaker talks about "breaking the habit tonight," and this habit could be the pattern of self-harm he seems to mentally enact. He feels out of control, insisting that the "battles always choose"; he cannot choose, and he feels very confused and in pain. Locked in his room, the speaker could be contemplating suicide, something that would indeed break the pattern of self-doubt and pain he feels. The "cure" then, is actually a dangerous thing in terms of his life, but he believes that it will solve the problem of his pain.
A simile compares two things by using 'like' or 'as,' so the first stanza of "Breaking the Habit" contains a simile in the second line, "like opening the wound." The songwriter compares looking back at his overwhelming memories to being similar to picking at wound.
The third stanza contains personification in the line "the battles always choose," because the writer gives battles a human characteristic or quality, in this case the ability to decide or choose the speaker of the song.
Stanza 6 has some nice alliteration, or repeating consonant sounds a the beginning of the word: "Clutching my cure."
Stanza 11 contains a hyperbole when the speaker claims, "I'll paint it on the walls." A hyperbole is an exaggeration. In this case, the speaker is not really going to paint his grievances on the wall, but he's exaggerating the extent of what he feels. "Paint[ing] it on the walls" is his way of saying that he really wants everyone to know how he feels about the situation.
All of the poem incorporates "breaking the habit" as a consistent extended metaphor; in this case, "the habit" could be a euphemism for a drug or alcohol addiction, or even an unhealthy relationship. Since the song does not specify what this particular dangerous habit may be, the true meaning is left up to the listener's imagination.