Prioritizing Habits
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You are what you do every day.
I don’t know who came up with this quote or where I even heard it first but it’s stuck with me ever since.
For the longest time, people would ask me what I do. I’d tell them I’m a writer. I’d feel pretty good about it too. But I shouldn’t have.
I haven’t been a writer. I have not been writing every day. In actuality you could say I’ve been a consumer of mindless information, a former of plans who never follows through on his intentions. That might be a bit unkind but it would also be true.
Many of us go through life wanting to be, and in fact, sometimes, truly believing that we are, someone who we are certainly not.
There’s a great deal of cognitive dissonance required to continuously state what you are so clearly not while making no efforts to change it. But it’s understandable. Change is hard. It takes unbelievable effort to stop being someone who you have always been.
Yet it is precisely that difficulty that makes it so worthwhile. Change takes effort. It takes time. But that is why it is so necessary for us to seek it out.
A life is simply too long to accomplish anything meaningful in a single day. A hundred meter race may only take ten seconds to run but it takes years and years of practice and preparation. It’s the same story in setting out to write a novel or complete an Iron Man. Anything worth doing takes time.
By far the greatest impact we can have on our lives is in changing our habits to most closely align with our intentional selves.
Many of us have undesirable habits. We bite our nails. We eat too much. Watch too much television.
In these moments, our intentions could not be further from our actions. We intend to be working, to be learning, to be breaking a sweat, when in actuality we are only mindlessly burning time away. Unwanted cravings pop up and our automatic responses kick into gear, succumbing to each whim as soon as it arises.
And it’s entirely possible to feel imprisoned by these impulses in the exact same moment that you are engaging with them. Bad habits die hard and all. And it hurts to know you’ve spent another day not being who you claim to be. But this state doesn’t have to be permanent.
Bad habits are entirely built on unwanted responses to natural impulses. The key is to accept the impulses. Undesirable as they may be, there is not a person alive who can suppress them entirely.
However, it is entirely possible to change how we react to those impulses.
Habits are built on a foundation of cue — response — reward
Hunger is cued by a rumbling stomach. The general response is to seek out food until the hunger is satiated — cue, response, reward.
Of course, food manufacturers understand it’s much easier to cue the hunger response with salts and fats than with organic produce. The image creates a cue and an unwanted craving.
You can’t help it. You want a cheeseburger.
Wanting a cheeseburger does not have to result in getting a cheeseburger. Instead, set up a healthier response you can follow through on that fulfills the same craving.
For example, have a jar of peanuts on hand that you can nibble on whenever you have the urge to pull into the drive-thru. It’s a much healthier source of fat and will sate your hunger more effectively than a cheeseburger.
If you don’t have the responses set up, more often than not, your body will fall back into the same bad habits it’s always had.
In the same way, if you want to write more regularly, set up a unique reward that you can only attain by hitting a certain word count.
Say you want to exercise more regularly, if there’s an audiobook or podcast you really enjoy, make sure that you are only able to listen to that podcast while you are exercising. Within a few days, you’ll be aching to work up a sweat just so you can listen to a new chapter. After a few weeks and you’ve quickly burnt through that audiobook, you’ll already have begun to associate working out with the pleasant reward of listening a new story unfold.
Of course, habit systems may not be perfect when they’re first designed. It may be easy to fall off the wagon in the beginning. But as soon as the habits are beginning to slip away, take a step back and redesign your cue-response-reward systems. There is something that can be tinkered with to keep you on track with your stated intentions.
Taking agency over your habits means taking responsibility over your time and actions. Impulses will come and go. Our responses to them are what will define us.
People will always ask you what you do. Being able to be honest in your response lifts a burden I didn’t know I lived with.
