“Most people do not have the willingness to break bad habits. They have lots of excuses and they talk like victims” Carlos Santana.
We have this story that is shared by all our modern cultures, but not the indigenous ones, which we just ignore because we can call then primitive and superstitious. Yet, our story is a hierarchically constructed one about how our world runs. As I seem to say continuously, we are nearly all conditioned to accept our consumer world as we think it is, even if we do not particularly like much of what is going on. Our production and consumption consumer framed conditioning has created habits that are collectively responsible for the ecological devastation we see all around the world. That clearly infers that most of us have some really ‘bad’ habits that if we don’t change them sooner rather than later will result in us all suffering.
This cultural story is odd, because it is designed to make us feel OK about it all. It explains why we should obediently go to work every day, doing jobs that we mostly do not enjoy, in order to earn the money that pays the everyday bills and importantly for this story, to buy consumer goods. And this story is sold to us as the acme of human achievement – we are to believe that humans never had it so good, ever, and this is normal and proper, even as numerous global ecological systems show clear signs of fatigue and failure.
I talk often how social conditioning created the consumer mindset to cause us to be blasé to ecological problems even when we think we know better, and desire to make a difference in the world – to change the world. Recall one of my mantra’s – A belief is just a thought that you just keep thinking. And beliefs create behaviors that become habits. A habit is a subconscious routine of behavior that is repeated regularly and is especially hard to give up. We like to make dichotomous comments about habits like we pass judgment on everything else in life, good-bad, right-wrong, etc. which are all subjective of course, based on the worldviews we frame them within. Keeping it simple for now, let’s just say that if you’re reading this blog, you think the world is in a downward spiral and major change is needed. And that change will mean we start noticing and recognizing the ‘habits’ that we do that harm the planet directly, or most likely, indirectly through maintenance of the consumer system.
Not everything is bad of course. For instance, my town, like many others has a great recycling and yard waste mulching curbside and drop-off system. Recycling programs are often not economically effective overall, but they are continued because they produce social habits that promote better ecological behavior. So, we can say that is a ‘good’ habit even if its current economic efficacy is debatable – it’s a step in the right direction towards a sustainable society even if much more is needed. The ‘bad’ habit of this scenario would be therefore that everything just goes to a landfill. The key here is to mindfully understand when a habit is contributing to a ‘good’ change or just maintaining a bad system – it’s about metacognition (e.g., see earlier post The role of Limiting Beliefs and Empowering Beliefs 1 – Becoming Empowered through Metacognition {May 2019}).
It’s one thing to recognize a ‘bad’ habit and another to actually succeed in changing it. So, let me talk a little about the psychology of Bad Habits. We break ‘bad’ habits by replacing them with ‘better’ habits until eventually all our behaviors are changed for the ‘better.’ I have read many of the notable life coaches on how to change habits, but it’s important to understand the basics of why habits keep us trapped in certain behaviors, and to a certain point, how they sometimes become pathological to us, i.e., addictions. The habit loop described below is incredibly powerful and hardwired into our psyches.
There are three distinct stages in a habit: Whenever you start to do any behavior, mindfully recognize what it is that is driving that specific behavior and your judgment of its merit – it is not always simple. For instance, at one time I realized I had a habit of drinking too much coffee that was making me jittery.
- The Trigger or Cue. The trigger for me was the seemingly unending time sitting at the computer and the need for a break.
- The Routine or Practice. To get a break I would grab the empty coffee mug on my desk and head down to the main office to refill the mug with fresh coffee form the departments coffee maker before heading back up to my office.
- The Reward or Incentive. Getting the break. But once I recognized the habit of how much coffee I was drinking – the negative aspect – I mindfully did not take the mug and instead went for a walk around the building – less coffee and different interesting interactions with more colleagues as well as more healthy exercise.
So, besides being mindful and using grim willpower to change poor behaviors, Psychologist Melody Wilding has some advice through a protocol for making the changes easier. And believe me when I say that consumer habits are deeply entrenched in our psyche’s. The first step is to mindfully identify the Trigger-Cue, Routine-Practice, Reward-incentive loop at play with all your behaviors (both good and bad). Then prioritize the ones that can be changed easily, to show you can actually do it, and then those that will cause most change in your belief structures thus contributing to a cognitive transformation within your worldviews, and hence change a plethora of your behaviors as groups of beliefs modify.
The second step after recognizing the habits and routines-practices that need changing is to decide how to change your routines to get the better results you desire (like my walking around the building instead of getting more coffee). After all the reward-incentive is crucial to motivating you to do a new habit and to maintaining that habit. What alternative behaviors and actions are comparable incentive-reward to the one you are trying to eliminate? Sometimes guilt works, but only for a short while. Create a list of options that give you equivalent incentive-rewards. After all, what will give you a sense of accomplishment, happiness, relaxation – whatever core need your current ‘bad’ habit is satisfying?
The third step 3 is to actually make a commitment to change and then importantly, tweak as you go. It might take a few efforts to find the incentive – reward that works for you. For instance, walking around the building worked for me to cut the coffee habit, but you might find reading something different than your work or going for a drink of water elsewhere in the building is sufficient. Find what works for you!
The fourth and last step is to not get discouraged and to anticipate setbacks will occur. Don’t beat yourself up and berate yourself for not being perfect. When I was young my parents both smoked, but neither liked it. My dad eventually quit cold-turkey (he had iron will) but my mother took another year or two before she finally started sucking a mint candy to occupy her instead of smoking. As wilding says, “Make your habit loop bulletproof: anticipate and plan for setbacks. If you’re trying to stick to a diet, think through situations that might challenge your healthy eating habits such as fancy business dinners, traveling for work, or high-stress times.” Likewise, if you want to improve your consumer-based habits start to think outside the proverbial box and think more spiritually, how your new behaviors will be of service to helping humanity and the planet, and how they will help you find that connectedness you want.
Understanding how to work within the psychology of habits, rather than against them improves your chances of succeeding in changes habits that know don’t work. As are you’ll find greater success in beating negative behaviors once and for all. As motivational speaker Denis Waitley said, “The truth is, you don’t break a bad habit; you replace it with a good one.” A better world come about when we choose it and that comes down to choosing better behaviors. It all comes down to metacognition again: “To change a habit, make a conscious decision, then mindfully act out the new behavior” Jurin.
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