We are all creatures of habit. We can’t help it, it’s quite literally built into the biological structure of our brains. That’s either great news, or it’s just depressing.
Our brains are fascinating. In order to ease the amount of information that they need to process, they build schemas, or frameworks that it uses to simplify whatever you’re doing. That’s why we don’t need total focus to brush our teeth, but when we start a new job, we’re constantly exhausted. It’s why we can drive to work on auto pilot, but also why we end up checking our phones about 96 times a day. It’s normally not critically evaluated thought, it’s just habit.
You need habits. Per Inc, adults make about 35,000 choices a day. That’s about 36 choices a minute for every hour you’re awake (assuming 8 hours of sleep, not counting hours spent on Netflix). Making 36 choices a minute would be overwhelming and exhausting and that’s why you need the habits.
One of the problems that we can run into, is that our lives become a collection of accidental habits. We end up doing things just because it’s how we’ve done it in the past. It’s not the life we’d pick, it’s just the life we have. Where this becomes dangerous is when we get to locked into our routine we don’t think we have any choice about what happens to us and what we do.
Our knee-jerk reaction to thinking about this is to just decide to change everything or nothing. This is actaully one of the worst ways to see successful long term change in our lives. It shows either ignorance or arrogance. Ignorance because we don’t’ know how people actually change, what makes habits sticky, or appreciate our brain’s need for slow change, or arrogance because we think we are better than the rest of the humans, and can simply decide by power of our will who and what we will be. Both are doomed for failure.
So first you have to start out small with just one question: What are you doing?
The scare part is that we don’t often know what we’re doing. And don’t even start with a why you’re doing it – that’s a post for a different day.
So what are you doing? Break your life into smaller segments, and ask yourself what is my routine for this part of my life?
I’m assuming you’re working a 9-5 here. That might not be you. If you’re home with the kids, or work flexibly you may need to use a builder calendar to map this out (that means break your day into 90- or 120-minute blocks, not 60-min blocks of time like a manager – it’s too granular).
Just keep track for a couple days, or even a week.
Once you’ve got an idea of what is happening, you can start to develop your why you’d like to do something different from your current routine. You can’t just jump straight from old what I used to do to new what I’m going to do next – it doesn’t work for building long-term habits without going through the hard work of figuring out the why.
To be continued…