Sunday Sessions #67
Time Travellers Guide to Bad Habits
What we are currently thinking..
Time Travellers Guide to Bad Habits
Why is it that quick fixes, especially in health and fitness, are so enticing? We know that short term solutions don’t work long term and yet we continuously wage war on our willpower with endless challenges, unsustainable eating patterns/diets, and excessive exercise.
While not the full picture, this is in part fuelled by our bias toward gratification. We believe that the harder we push, the better the result. The better the result, the better we feel. And the better we feel, the more likely we are to keep going. We want to see the fruits of our labour and the best way to do that is to provide the stimulus we know (or at least hope) will lead to the result.
The wall we inherently run into is one of ourselves. Our own bad habits. The ability for us to sustain whatever result we are striving to achieve is underpinned by the behaviours we have formed and/or change during that process. This is one of the arguments people make for why “diets don’t work”. It’s not that diets don’t work, they work exceptionally well, but most people use those diets like they would a course of antibiotics. I don’t feel good and want to feel better, so I’ll take this diet for 8 weeks. But unlike antibiotics, once you stop, the problem doesn’t go away. What happens is an inevitable regression to the start.
We need to begin to realise that our success is not determined by how hard we push but by the degree to which we change our underlying behaviours.
What makes many diets so enticing is exactly what makes behaviour change so bland. The immediate gratification of ‘you are on the right track’ is no longer there and, if anything, there’s a sense of regression more than progression. Ironically, short term progress probably offers a false sense of progression - we all know the story of the tortoise and the hare. What begins to happen when you start to focus on habits, particularly your bad ones, is that you notice now all the times you do them. Often on the daily, or even multiple times a day. I’ve spoken a bout it before, but one of mine that I continually need to work through is snacking when I come home. Irrespective of how many times I walk through the door after being out somewhere during the day, no matter the time, whether I’ve eaten or not, I always have an itch to open the pantry cupboard and fill my lonely mouth. When I first started to pay attention to my behaviours I thought that this was only a “when I get home from work issue”. What I began to understand was that this is an every time I get home issue. The more I looked, the worse I seemingly got.
I think it’s important to note, that although it may “seem” like you are getting worse, it’s likely that you are just getting a more accurate representation of reality. After all, habits, by definition, are unconscious. It’s not that watching my eating habits created worse eating habits, but now I am more conditioned to see them in all their glory. As Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Jung said, “one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious”.
Early on when I got interested in habit formation I never really understood the compassion component that everyone talked about. It just seemed to go over my head. I thought, much like in my sporting background, I too could arm wrestle my habits into submission. Overtime I’ve come to learn that compassion is for the 100 if not thousands of times that you will fail before you start seeing yourself succeed. When we wrestle with our habits the inevitable short coming that arises (opening the pantry door and grabbing a snack) gets associated with guilt and, again, like in any test we’ve ever taken, failure. But failure to change our habits, in the early stages, is a part of the progress.
Working on your habits is like taking a step in a time machine. The more we work on them the more we are able to step back in time and notice prior events or cues that eventually change our response. But first we need awareness. We need the awareness of missing the mark. The guilt you experience is a strong cue which can be used to help build conscious connections to the problem. But we can’t linger in the guilt. The guilt is a signal, a time travelling version of you coming back from the future to remind you, “do you really want to do that?”. The only way for us to not linger in the guilt of our stray actions is to have compassion. An understanding that yes we have missed the mark, but we have seen it - “huh, I did it again”. Compassion needs to be there, not as an out, but as a reward for actually seeing it in the first place. The initial win in habit change is in fact seeing yourself doing the habit - bringing the darkness to light. The best time to see our short comings, especially in the beginning, is in fact in retrospect. You need to fail in order to succeed.
The more awareness we have around a behaviour the further back in time that little reminder starts to pop up. Instead of retrospect, we begin to catch ourselves mid act. For me, I could start to see my arm reach out for the pantry door. Once we begin to catch ourselves mid act we can notice more easily the itch-like triggers that normally lead to the behaviour in the first place. Boredom, stress, environment, time of day. For me, walking through the door is an environmental trigger of “catching up”. When I was younger I rarely took adequate lunch to school and instead opted to play sport. By the end of the day, I was so hungry I’d get home and fill that deficit by opening the pantry and filling my mouth with whatever I could get my hands on. Walking through the door now is in fact the trigger of “hey, catch up”, even though that trigger no longer serves me. Funnily enough I still get the “hunger” without actually being hungry (In some cases I have just ate directly before coming home). At the start of your habit journey, the connections between your emotions or environment and your habits aren’t strong enough to break to loop. You need to first work back in time.
I am under no illusion that most people won’t want to start seeing themselves regress right from the get go. Most people of course will want to see some progress. I don’t think we have to push our goals to one side in order to work through our underlying behaviours. But we must be understanding that our bad habits will make for a bumpy ride, and this is a part of the process. We don’t ever plan to screw up the day, but sometimes, stress, environment, or boredom will creep in unannounced. And, as every habit was once a solution to a recurring problem, we fall back into old patterns. In these moments, instead of telling ourselves off like we’ve done something wrong, just pay attention. Non-judgemental curiosity. An awareness that you’re back into the age old loop of your habit system. What lead to that? What does it feel like? Somatically. For me, it resembles an itch that you want to scratch. Over time you begin to build the connection that not all itches need to be scratched, and, where you are likely to find those damn mosquitos (what events lead to the habit). You build the connection that, if you are going outside, put on repellent.
The arm wrestling match, telling off system that we are so use to obviously doesn’t work. If it did, we wouldn’t end up in the same predicament each time scratching the itches of our past.
Step into the time machine of your own bad habits.