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You Can’t Get Off the Hamster Wheel

July 8, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

Large Blog Image

Your brain has a mind of its own.

It operates largely outside your awareness and without your consent.

It has developed an agenda for you that determines how you react, the way you think and feel, and what you do.

Your brain’s agenda may have little in common with what you’re trying to create for yourself, but like it or not, its agenda is your agenda.

In order to retrain your brain to get it on board with YOUR agenda, you need to:

1. Find out how your brain actually works.

2. Identify what you really want in your life.

3. Learn how to use your brain to create MORE of what you want and LESS of what you don’t want.

 

Filed Under: Brain, Habit, Living, Mind Tagged With: Autopilot, Brain, hamster wheel, Mind, Unconscious

Clarity Comes Before Consistency

July 6, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

should what?

Consistency is a concept that has developed a bad rap, at least in some neighborhoods. I’m not sure why this is but I suspect it’s because consistent has become another thing we should be, at least in regard to developing those habits that are good for us. Right off the bat, labeling a habit as being good for us automatically makes it a tough sell. If it was something we were going to enjoy, we wouldn’t have to persuade ourselves to do it on a regular basis, would we?

For some, consistent = boring, repetitious,predictable, even regimented. It connotes a lack of spontaneity and freedom and engenders an instantaneous desire to rebel. It evokes, for those folks, the mental image of swallowing an evil-tasting pill.

For others, consistency is nearly as elusive to achieve as locating the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It seems like a really good idea. At least they’ve heard that it is. Not being consistent at maintaining good-for-them habits makes some of these people feel bad about themselves and what they perceive of as their lack of will power.

For yet others, consistency is but a speck in the rear view mirror as they speed past it all the way to rigidity. Good ideas, good-for-them habits, personal goals or intentions—all are transformed into self-imposed rules that must—and will—be adhered to no matter what.

Maybe we ought to look a little closer at those things we think we should be more consistent about. When you hear yourself say I know I should be [fill in the blank], stop and ask yourself why you think you should be doing—or not doing—whatever it is. Because it’s good for you isn’t a good enough answer. And that’s certainly not enough to motivate you to do it.

What Do You Really Want?

If you can’t come up with a better answer, maybe you’re putting the cart before the horse. Maybe you’re trying to make some positive changes without having clearly defined what you are aiming for in the long run. What do you want to get out of being more consistent about [fill in the blank] and why do you want that? What is the overall positive outcome you’re trying to achieve?

If you’re aiming for something you really want, and you identify the steps it will take to get there, it’s a lot easier to be consistent about taking them. I don’t mean to imply it’s that simple or easy because it isn’t. But if you have gotten to this point and you know the what and the why of the habit you want to change or begin or improve, there’s a process, outlined by Charles Duhigg in The Power of Habit, that can help you do it.

Habits are powerful, but delicate. They can emerge outside our consciousness, or can be deliberately designed. They often occur without our permission, but can be reshaped by fiddling with their parts. They shape our lives far more than we realize—they are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense. –Charles Duhigg

Since some of the formation and operation of habits is outside of our conscious awareness, we might as well stop beating ourselves up over our track record. We don’t need to keep sparring with our inconsistency. Instead, we can learn how to work with what scientists call “the habit loop.” Duhigg’s book is a great place to start.

(originally posted 1/13/13 as The Consistency Hobgoblin)

Filed Under: Brain, Choice, Finding What You Want, Habit, Living, Mind Tagged With: Brain, Choice, Clarity, Consistency, Habit, Mind

What Do Your Habits Say About You?

July 3, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

Riding a Bicycle

Once a behavior or routine becomes a habit, it is subsequently initiated by the unconscious, usually as a result of something in the environment—a cue or a trigger. Our resulting behavior is no longer intentional or volitional. We’re operating on autopilot.

We think behavioral habits are just something we do, but in spite of what we think, our habits reveal more about us than our intentional acts do.

Why We Have Habits

The brain creates behavioral habits, with or without our conscious participation, in order to operate more efficiently. It chunks repetitive behaviors and turns the chunks over to the basal ganglia so we don’t have to waste our precious and limited conscious attention on them. Habits are an energy-saving device.

When we’re learning something new (or creating or changing a habit), we have to focus a lot of conscious attention on what we’re doing. Anything that requires conscious attention uses energy, and in any given day we have a limited amount of it. It’s not an easily renewable resource. But once a habit is in place, little or no conscious attention is needed.

Examples:

  • driving a car
  • playing an instrument, if you’re trained
  • raiding the refrigerator in the evening
  • brushing your teeth before going to bed
  • checking your email first thing in the morning

Good habits, bad habits, they’re all the same to the brain. It doesn’t care about our opinions of our habits. All it cares about it is being efficient. Do something—anything—often enough and it will become a habit. And habits, by their nature, are hard to change. Trying to exert will power, using positive thinking, engaging in deep soul searching, or looking for the underlying cause of a habit are all fruitless endeavors. Unfortunately, you can’t have a heart-to-heart with your basal ganglia.

 But Aren’t I in Charge?

The common assumption is that behaviors are preceded by conscious intentions. We decide what we’re going to do and then do it. But only some behaviors are preceded by conscious intentions, far fewer than we’d like to believe. Estimates are that from 50% to 80% of what we do every day we do on autopilot, which means without conscious intention or volition. We may be operating a 4,000 pound vehicle on a busy highway at a speed of 65 miles an hour or more while our minds are somewhere far, far away. This is especially likely to happen if we’re familiar with the route. We don’t need to pay conscious attention to our driving if nothing out of the ordinary occurs. We can zone out and our unconscious can generally get us to our destination just fine.

But since we tend to identify only with our conscious brain and not with our unconscious, we identify with our wandering mind instead of with what we’re actually doing.  And because we’re under the illusion that most of what we do is the result of conscious choice (behaviors are preceded by conscious intentions), we’re not aware of how pervasive habits are in our lives.

When we find ourselves doing something we’d rather not do (or not doing something we’d rather do), we’d prefer to believe we’ve willfully chosen the behavior just so we can maintain the illusion of being in control. But it’s not very satisfying to think that we’re intentionally and repeatedly doing something we have an intention not to do. We don’t understand why we can’t simply will ourselves (or, in some cases, beat our lazy selves into submission) to get the desired results. We end up feeling inadequate, ashamed, guilty, and possibly slightly crazy. The obvious and easy way out is to dis-identify with the behavior. That’s not the real me. That doesn’t reflect who I am. It’s just something I do.

Just as the brain has a habit of generating habits with no regard for our judgments and opinions about them, we have a habit of thinking less of our habits than we do of our intentional acts regardless of what that behavior actually amounts to. It’s not what we do that matters so much as whether we did it intentionally or as a result of a habit.

Portrait of René Descartes, dubbed the "F...

Not only do we think intentional acts define us more than habits do, we also think that what we think and wish and want is more important than what we actually do. (Rene Descartes would be proud.)

We think that what we think is of supreme importance. Next most important are our intentional acts. At the bottom of the list, getting extremely short shrift, are our habits.

But we have it backwards. It’s what we do that ultimately matters, not what we think or want. And what we do is primarily habitual (unconsciously generated) rather than intentional (consciously determined). Habits actually say more about us than intentional acts do.

Still Don’t Think Much of Habits?

In a study of habits vs. non-habits,” reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers found that participants thought habits weren’t as important as non-habits in reaching goals and were relatively uninformative about themselves and others.

Given the percentage of time each day we spend engaged in habitual behaviors, this is stunningly wrong-headed.

Another odd finding that came out of the studies on habits vs. non-habits was this:

Feelings of stress increased with the deliberation involved in a single non-habitual behavior rather than as a result of multitasking. According to Roy Baumeister (Professor of Psychology, Florida State University), the act of decision making about a single behavior can deplete self-control mechanisms and impair subsequent acts of self-regulation such as decision-making and performance.

Habits, however, do not drain self-control resources to the same extent as non-habits. Once a behavior becomes a habit, it frees up our conscious attention

There is less emotion associated with habitual behaviors than with non-habitual ones. There is a decreased sense of volition, as well, but that is accompanied by less stress, burnout, and feeling out of control.

It’s a little confounding that we fail to recognize the many benefits habits confer.

We Are What We D0

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

This is actually a paraphrase of Aristotle by Will Durant in The Story of Philosophy. One thing Aristotle did say, though, is “these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions.”

It’s easy to see how this works—that is, the positive, productive role of habits—in the development of a skill or craft—that of a musician, an artist, a writer, a quilter, or a cook, for example. We generally expect that the more a musician practices her instrument, the more dishes a cook prepares, the better they will become at doing those things. A musician is unlikely to attain excellence if she only practices when she’s in the mood for it. Skillful musicians develop the habit of practicing regularly whether they’re in the mood for it or not. And they don’t have to be in the mood for it precisely because they’ve developed the habit. They don’t have to waste conscious attention or drain self-control resources by thinking about or deciding each time whether or not to practice.

If a musician’s sense of identity includes her musicianship, then her habit of practice says quite a lot about who she is—as opposed to who a non-musician might be. When she shows up onstage to perform a violin solo, for example, her habit of practicing ensures that her fingers know what to do with the violin. Her habit of practicing certainly contributed to her reaching her musical goals. Without it, she might still be thinking about becoming a violinist or wishing it were so.

Habits and routines make achieving goals considerably easier. Habits and routines can free our conscious minds for greater things, and they are actually essential to people who need to be creative on a regular basis.

Habits Really ARE Us

Our conscious intentions are not reliable when it comes to predicting what we’ll do when well-entrenched habitual behaviors are involved. In such cases, environmental cues and triggers are much more influential and, therefore, much more reliable predictors. What we have done before is what we are likely to do again. (Intentions, however, are more predictive of future behavior in new or novel situations.)

Because habitual behaviors are cued by situations, events, or other people instead of by our conscious prodding, we feel somewhat disengaged from them. It seems that there’s a continuum between intention and habit. It doesn’t much matter whether the habit in question is one we intentionally set out to create or one that was created when we weren’t paying attention. A habit is a habit is a habit, and the further a behavior moves from the intention end of the continuum to the habit end, the lower our opinion of it becomes.

There is an important role for consciousness to play in regard to our habits. If we understand and accept the enormous usefulness of habits, we can use the conscious part of our brain to decide which habits we want to create or change. That’s where the “I” we identify with comes into play. It sets the agenda for which behaviors to chunk and turn into habits.

That requires paying attention to what we’re actually doing. (It turns out that one of the very few ways we can get some idea of what’s in our unconscious is by observing what we do—not by observing what we think, dream, or wish for.) We also need to have some idea about what we want and what it will take to get it.

In any case, we would do well to give more credit to the unconscious part of our brain and recognize that it is just as much a part of who we are as is the conscious part, probably even more so. Then we might be able to start using it instead of letting it use us, which it does in this case by chunking behaviors without our awareness and consent.

Here’s a Question

If you identified with your habits, as much as you do with your intentional acts, how might that change your sense of yourself? And how might changing your sense of yourself alter your relationship with your habits?

Filed Under: Brain, Consciousness, Habit, Living, Mind, Unconscious Tagged With: Behavior, Brain, Habit, Intention, Mind

What’s Choice Got to Do with It?

June 23, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Fat Cat?

What’s the difference between the things you want to do that you’re actually doing and the things you want to do that you’re struggling with doing?

It often comes down to this: you think you have a choice about doing the things you’re struggling with.

If you’re clear about why you’re doing something (or want to do something) and you’re committed to doing it, you don’t waste ongoing time and effort choosing whether or not to do it each time the situation arises. What kind of sense would that make? It’s something you want to do, you know why you want to do it, and you’re committed to doing it. It may not be easy, but that’s a separate issue. The point is that there’s nothing to be gained—and something to be lost—by not doing it.

  • If you have a kid in school who you pick up every afternoon, you don’t think I really should go get Josh, but nah, I’m going to stay home and watch this movie.
  • If you have a job you value, you don’t wake up each morning wondering Hmmm, what should I do today? Go to work? Check out the horse races? Maybe drive out to the coast for a leisurely lunch?
  • If you have a pet you care for, you don’t ask yourself Should I buy food for Fluffy this week or spend the money on a bottle of wine?

Picking up your kid after school every day may be inconvenient. Getting up and going to work may be an effort some days more than others, even if you love you job. Caring for a pet can be expensive (and maybe Fluffy needs to be on a diet, but still…). There may be some struggle involved in all three situations—but the struggle isn’t about whether or not to follow through on your commitment. It’s a given that you will.

So if you think you have a choice about whether or not to do something, you probably aren’t clear about why you want to do it and you aren’t committed to doing it.

 ~ ~ ~

Thanks to  the participants of the Create Your Own Story! course for inspiring this post. 

Filed Under: Beliefs, Choice, Habit, Happiness, Living Tagged With: Choice, Clarity, Commitment, Having a Choice

Consciousness Is Like a Jar of Marbles

June 19, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 7 Comments

jar of marblesImagine your conscious attention, which really is a limited resource, is a jar and all the thoughts inside it are marbles—or, as I call them, things taking up headspace. The more marbles you have in your jar:

♦ the less conscious attention you have available
♦ the less you’re able to focus
♦ the more easily you’re distracted
♦ the less you’re able to cope with difficult or trying circumstances
♦ the less you’re able to maintain balance or equanimity
♦ the less you’re able to think clearly
♦ the greater your chances of forgetting something or making a mistake
♦ the less you’re able to grasp the bigger picture
♦ the more likely you are to be chronically anxious, stressed, depressed, or irritated
♦ the less joy you’ll experience

You can’t keep adding more marbles to the jar indefinitely. Your brain needs breathing room (headspace) to work efficiently. Otherwise, your thinking and your life are likely to become claustrophobic. If you want to be able to access as much of your conscious attention as possible, you need to develop the intention and the habit of removing marbles from the jar.

First, take care of business. Complete outstanding projects or tasks, resolve issues, fix what needs to be fixed, and get rid of as much clutter and excess baggage as possible.

Second, stop indiscriminately adding new marbles to the jar. Continue taking care of business, don’t take on new stuff or new obligations unless you have to or they are truly meaningful to you. Recognize the allure of these colorful shiny objects and inure yourself to their appeal. You can do it!

Filed Under: Brain, Consciousness, Habit, Living, Mind Tagged With: Brain, Clutter, Conscious Attention, Consciousness, Headspace, Mind, Thought

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