Sunday Sessions #69
I Know What To Do, Why Don't I Do It?
What we are currently thinking..
Time Travel pt. 2 - I know what to do, so why don’t I do it?
“what is the best way to lose weight?”
What comes over us with these types of questions is a pull toward instant gratification. What can I do to see or achieve the thing I want in the shortest possible time? In our attempt at the 100m dash we become possessed by perfection. As I’m sure you are all too familiar with, striving for perfection often leads to anything other than perfection. We end up missing the mark, falling short, of either our goals or our ambitious striving. I’ve said it before, but our perfection becomes the barrier preventing us from achieving our goals. We end up disheartened, wondering “I know what to do, so why can’t I do it!?”
The easy answer to this question is not attempting a 100m dash with your health goals in the first place. Health is by definition a long term goal (no one plans to wake up tomorrow morning with diabetes or to have a heart attack). Something we sustain for a long period of time. The problem with the 100m dash is that it is an all out effort, over in 10-15secs, leaving us unable to sustain that pace any longer. Using this strategy to achieve health inherently sets us up to fail from the beginning. Try sprinting a marathon.
An alternative answer, one that gets neglected, is you haven’t worked through the bad habits that got you in the predicament in the first place. It’s all well and good opting for a steady, sustainable approach, but, if you don’t work through the behaviours that lead you astray these will always be your lingering dark cloud. The limiting factor following you around - I know what to do, but I don’t do it.
We’ve talked about it before but working through your bad habits is like taking a step into a Time Machine. The first step, stepping into the Time Machine, is all about awareness. Awareness that you are doing the thing that you don’t want to do - acknowledging the bad habit, and when you are doing it. This awareness allows you to build connections around why you are continuously falling short. It allows you to slow down time and notice the bad habits at increasingly earlier stages.
The second step (after awareness), which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago is acceptance, or compassion. Compassion for the hundreds of times that you will likely fall short before you start to see your self succeed. Success during the awareness stage is just noticing that you are missing the mark. Compassion, or acceptance, is needed for when you still choose to follow through or have already followed through, even after noticing the bad habit. I still do it to this day. I can see my arm reaching for the crackers, or lollies, or chocolate, as if it were in slow motion. But just because I notice it, doesn’t mean I always prevent the well trained grip response at the end.
When you have trained awareness with compassion you have successfully managed to slow down time. You can now see the itch-like triggers that lead you astray. It’s here that I left our last session on the time travel of bad habits. But now that we are in the Time Machine, where do we go? How do we do the thing the we know we should?
This leads us to one of my favourite sayings, adult choices. Making an adult choice is noticing the itch, understanding why that itch is there, and then deciding what action you want to take (the compulsion of a bad habit is often the opposite of an adult decision). The decision we have at this point, is either continue to engage in the bad habit, with full understanding of why, or opting for an alternative behaviour. One that would be more in line with what we should do.
This decision, I have come to learn, can be made easier under the guiding light of self respect. We know what the right thing is, it’s riddled in the guilt we experience from not doing it. We think we need more discipline, will power, and self control, but really what we need is more self awareness, self compassion, and self respect. If we were being respectful of ourselves, what would we do?
How do we act with self respect? For me, when I notice that I’m getting home and heading straight for the cupboard, or after opening the fridge for the 100th time in the space of ten minutes, self respect is sitting in that slightly uncomfortable hunger (like when you don’t scratch a persistent itch). It’s knowing that I want to go straight for the pantry, but I don’t have to. Self respect is also noticing when the craving won’t go away and being able to scratch it in a controlled way. I’ll have the chocolate but decide how much I want to have. I’ll notice I don’t want to go to the gym, take a day off, and go for a walk instead. Self respect is about making adult choices. Choosing to do something, even if it isn’t optimal, rather than throwing the towel.
The more we sit in the uncomfortable reality of our unscratched bad habits the more we begin to free ourselves up to make adult choices. You can normally use your over justifications and rationalisations to catch yourself out. “I’ve been good on my diet all week, I deserve this treat”. “I’ve had a long day at work, I don’t need to go to the gym”. Use your justifications as the awareness trigger.
To do the thing you know you should do requires awareness. Awareness of the fact that you don’t actually want to do it. Once you have the awareness you can better understand why. Where did this come from? Are you stressed? Tired? Burnt out? With this new understanding what adult choice will you make? If you are to be respectful of yourself, what can you do? I can’t answer these questions for you, this is why I call it navigating the grey. There’s no right or wrong answer, the only task is to accept the decision we make and make them as an adult.
When you act with self respect, when you make adult choices, you feel like you are still on track. You feel like you have still done something when you would otherwise do nothing. This leads to a greater acceptance of the journey you are on, the marathon of health. You learn to run the marathon at your own pace. A pace that you can sustain. You learn that you don’t need to be perfect but you can also be comfortable being a little uncomfortable.