Living Archives - Page 49 of 51

The Way of Habits

February 24, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

New Year's Resolution — New Year’s Resolution (Photo credit: AlaskaTeacher)

Just as trying to make the one right and perfect choice is a hopeless task that’s likely to leave you mildly dissatisfied at best and exhausted, confused, and depressed at worst, there’s probably no one right and perfect way to change or begin habits. I’m a big fan of Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit) because his ideas make sense, are backed by research, and they work (I’ve used them). The more you know about how the habit loop works, the better your chances are of succeeding in having the habits you want and not having the habits you don’t want.

Another idea, however, is to make very, very small changes. This idea is explained by Leo Babauta in his blog Zen Habits:

Actually doing the habit is much more important than how much you do.

If you want to exercise, it’s more important that you actually do the exercise on a regular basis, rather than doing enough to get a benefit right away. Sure, maybe you need 30 minutes of exercise to see some fitness improvements, but try doing 30 minutes a day for two weeks. See how far you get, if you haven’t been exercising regularly. Then, if you don’t succeed, try 1-2 minutes a day. See how far you get there.

If you can do two weeks of 1-2 minutes of exercise, you have a strong foundation for a habit. Add another week or two, and the habit is almost ingrained. Once the habit is strong, you can add a few minutes here and there. Soon you’ll be doing 30 minutes on a regular basis — but you started out really small….

Your mileage will vary, but on average most people get farther with a habit when they start small. One glass of water a day. One extra vegetable. Three pushups. One sentence of writing a day. Two minutes of meditation. This is how you start a habit that lasts.

I think this method can work if you’re especially resistant to doing something or if you tend to overreach, fail, give up–and repeat the cycle.

But sometimes there’s a greater urgency to the situation. You don’t have time to go slow and small. You need to change and you need to do it now. When you recognize and accept the urgency, you may be surprised at how quickly you can change your habits. But that’s the key: recognizing and accepting the need to change, to either start doing something you weren’t doing or start doing something differently.

So rather than trying to figure out the best way to start or change a habit–any habit–you may first need to clarify some other things, such as how important this particular thing is to you, how urgent it is to deal with, what your past experience (if any) has been with it, and what your own personal inclinations and tendencies are. Then use that criteria to select a habit-starting or habit-changing method.

Choosing to Change

February 23, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

The Power Of Habit (Photo credit: Earthworm)

Much of our behavior is habitual. It’s the nature of things.

Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort. Left to its own devices, the brain will try to make almost any routine into a habit, because habits allow our minds to ramp down more often. This effort-saving instinct is a huge advantage. An efficient brain requires less room, which makes for a smaller head, which makes childbirth easier and therefore causes fewer infant and mother deaths. An efficient brain also allows us to stop thinking constantly about basic behaviors, such as walking and choosing what to eat, so we can devote mental energy to inventing spears, irrigation systems, and eventually, airplanes and video games. –Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit

What happens is that once a habit forms and behavior becomes automatic, we start thinking less.

The brain turns routines into habits without our having much say so in the process. We each have habits we didn’t intend to create. We didn’t freely choose to create them. So if we didn’t freely choose to create a habit, we can’t simply choose to uncreate it or modify it. We will most certainly fail, and then either conclude we have no will power or create a story about it. Eventually we may start to think there’s something wrong with us.

It’s definitely possible to change an existing habit or create a new habit, but will power isn’t the key. The way to deal with habits is to understand the way the brain works to create and maintain habits and to become familiar with the three-step process of the habit loop:

Cue
Routine
Reward

Imagine trying to prepare a casserole without understanding the relationship between ingredients, oven temperature, and cooking time. How far would will power take you in getting it right?

I wrote about habits in Nine Paths last year, if you’re interested in a little (or a lot) more:

Hat Railings and Other Habits

Your Basal Ganglia and You

Cultivating a Craving

You’ve Got to Believe

Seeking the One Right and Perfect Choice

February 21, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

It’s good to have options. It’s good to have choices. The more the better, right? But maybe we can actually have too many of them. Maybe having so many things to choose from complicates our lives rather than enhancing them. It’s been suggested that having so many options has two negative effects. The first is that it produces paralysis: we can’t decide which thing to choose, so we choose none. The second is that it escalates our expectations so that even if we do make a choice, we aren’t really satisfied with it. What if there was a better choice? What if we made the wrong choice?

A lot of the research in this area has been done in regard to product choices, but the principles apply to all kinds of choices. Maybe our choice-making behavior carries over from—or at least is reinforced by—our shopping experiences.

[I]t seems that as society grows wealthier and people become freer to do whatever they want, they get less happy. —Barry Schwartz, The Tyranny of Choice, Scientific American, December 2004

Maybe the abundance of choices we have impacts our ability to create meaning in our lives. How much time and mental energy do we spend trying to decide: what to do on our vacation, where to go for dinner, which item to select from the menu, what to wear to this or that event, whether or not to redecorate the kitchen (or bedroom or bath) and then what colors to use and which things to replace, whether to get this book (or CD or DVD) or that one, which movie to go to, what kind of car to buy, which area to major in in college, which job to apply for or accept, and—for many—what the heck to do with the rest of our lives.

Some of the choices we have to make are far weightier than others, but I wonder if we’ve become so bad at making day-to-day choices—so hung up on the process—that it’s impaired our choice-making ability. If it’s true that we have escalated expectations about the effect a particular brand of olive oil or car or kitchen appliance is going to have on our lives, imagine what our expectations are about the really significant things, such as who we choose to spend our lives with, whether or not we choose to have children, and what career path we choose for ourselves. How can reality meet those heightened expectations? The research says that it can’t and doesn’t.

The secret to happiness is low expectations. –Barry Schwartz

The grass is always greener somewhere else as long as we think there is one right and perfect choice and we need to find and select it from all the options available. How will we ever know whether or not we made that one right and perfect choice? It’s not a game show where we’ll find out at the end that Door Number Three was the one with the biggest prize.

Freedom from Choice

February 17, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 7 Comments

The concepts of freedom and choice seem to belong side by side. What is freedom if not freedom to choose? The idea that we could be free, experience freedom, without also having and exercising the ability to choose is difficult to contemplate. But Krishnamurti believed otherwise.

We think that through choice we are free, but choice exists only when the mind is confused. There is no choice when the mind is clear. When you see things very clearly without any distortion, without any illusions, then there is no choice. A mind that is choiceless is a free mind, but a mind that chooses and therefore establishes a series of conflicts and contradictions is never free because it is in itself confused, divided, broken up.

In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert relates the results of a study involving photography students who were put into two groups, the escapable group and the inescapable group. After developing their two best prints, all students were told they could keep one print, but the other print would be kept on file. The students in the escapable group were told they had several days to change their minds about which print they kept. The students in the inescapable group were not allowed to change their minds.

The results showed that students in the escapable group liked their photographs less than did students in the inescapable group…. Apparently, inescapable circumstances trigger the psychological defenses that enable us to achieve positive views of those circumstances, but we do not anticipate that this will happen.

I got a taste of this recently when some blood test results turned a couple of things that had, until then, been desirable to do into things I have to do. When I merely wanted to do them, they were actually a much bigger issue. I was invested in figuring out the best way to do them. When I was presented with this new information, I gave up trying to figure it out and began doing them just like that. It took me a couple of days to come to terms with the situation. I briefly bemoaned my perceived lack of choice in the matter, but I’m no longer struggling with it. My mind isn’t at all confused about the situation. And the truth is that I do feel a much greater sense of freedom than I did when I believed doing or not doing those things was a matter of choice (escapable).

The costs and benefits of freedom are clear–but alas, they are not equally clear: We have no trouble anticipating the advantages that freedom may provide, but we seem blind to the joys it can undermine. –Daniel Gilbert

Is It Too Late to Turn Around?

February 14, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

A fork in the road Which way should i go? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are headed. –Lao Tzu

It doesn’t matter how old we are, we can still find ourselves traveling on the wrong road heading straight toward something we know isn’t—or is no longer—right for us. Or maybe we don’t yet fully know it, but we’re definitely beginning to suspect that something about this road isn’t right. The older we are, however, the harder it can be for us to pull up, take stock, and change direction. Depending on how far along the wrong road we’ve traveled, it may seem easier to stay in denial rather than acknowledging we’re on the wrong path. Maybe we have a heavy stake—financial, time, or otherwise—in continuing along that road.

Sometimes we can look back and see a different fork we wish we’d taken. On the other hand, we may not have a concrete idea of where it is we actually want to go. In that case, it may seem like a waste of time to even think about whether or not to stay on the road we’re already on. What’s the point? Or maybe the very idea that we’re on the wrong road is kind of embarrassing, and that’s why we don’t want to admit it. But those are not good reasons to continue putting one foot in front of the other and moving closer and closer to a destination you no longer want to reach.

Is the path or road you’re traveling meaningful to you? Can you define what that meaning is? If not, or if you’re not sure, why not step back and at least clarify for yourself what it is you’re doing. If you know you don’t want what’s at the end of the road you’re on, do yourself a huge favor: stop. If you know where it is you want to go, start figuring out how to get there.

You cannot change your destination overnight, but you can change your direction overnight. –Jim Rohn

We won’t have the opportunity to change course after we’re dead, so if that’s what we need to do, the time to do it is now.

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