It's amazing how deeply a broken heart can move you. Things you have heard about yourself for years, that bounced off of you like rubber, have now hit you like a speeding train. You see the true damage that your most deeply ingrained habits have caused. Not only to others, but to yourself. At first, the biggest sensation is shame. A deep sense of shame, regret, and mourning. As if you had watched yourself accidentally kill the person you love the most. And in a pretty real sense, you have. You think "My God... What have I done? I never meant to do this!"
There is a period of intense squirming. Severe discomfort in your harsh new reality. She is really gone, and life will never be the same. The grief is overwhelming. You spend hours ruminating, crying, panicking. Shutting the world and everyone else in it out of your mind. You can't eat, can't focus, can't sleep. It is mental torture from which you feel you will never emerge. You tell yourself the harshest "truths". "You did this, and you can't undo it. You are a failure. You lost the one you loved most and you hurt her. You deserve to sit in this for the rest of your life." As if a lifetime is somehow a fair punishment for two years of bad choices driven by bad habits.
Habits... that's a funny word. It is an interesting and uncomfortable truth to realize that all of the best and worst parts of ourselves are nothing more than a habit. Defined as "a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up." We enter this planet as a blank slate. Our brains but a perfectly clean canvas for our families and friends to draw the world upon. Nearly every part of how we think and act is a learned behavior... either something we learned by direct example from our parents, or learned by positive and negative reinforcement. I would argue that most of the time, we are not even aware of these behaviors we have learned until they begin to cause us significant distress. Either in our mental health, relationships or both, distress is usually the first and only warning sign that perhaps we are not being the best versions of ourselves. And yet, what do we change? Unless we can pinpoint the specific habits of mind and causes of our discontentment, there is little that we can do to change them.
Science says it takes, on average, 66 days to make a habit become automatic. And the beginning is the hardest of all. How do you force yourself to step out of your daily routine, your most automatic mindsets, and do something differently? How do you even notice it, much less change it? How do you build consistency? Well, if the answers to these questions were easy, then I imagine there would be a lot more effective people in the world. We wouldn't have such large diet industries or mental health industries. We would be able to just DO all of the things we know we're supposed to do. Everybody would be healthier and happier. And yet, we know it's not that simple. We live in a morbidly obese, depressed, anxious world full of people who want something better for their lives.
What, then, separates the "wanters" from the "doers"? What do the doers do differently? What drives them? What keeps them going after that initial burst of excitement has worn off? What sustains them through that minimum sixty six day requirement? Well, having only started this for myself ten days ago, I don't profess to know all of those answers. But here is what is working well so far.
Strategies for Breaking Bad Habits (especially multiple ones at once)
1. To first change a habit, you write out an intention to break it. For me, the habits I am tackling are:
a. Trying to desperately control situations that I dislike or avoid scenarios I fear the most
b. Emotionally manipulating people into doing the things I want them to do. More specifically, speaking impulsively without thinking about the consequences of my words.
c. Spending too much time distracted on Facebook and not with the people I love
d. Selfishness and putting my needs in front of the needs of others
2. Before you can even change a habit, you must notice it in yourself. You must notice the habit as it happens, without judging yourself or the habit itself. To do this, I am using a tally counter on my phone. Each time I have an undesirable thought: one of anxiety, fear, desperation, jealousy, anger, or any of the negative emotions I am trying to change, or for any time I feel the urge to do something I know I shouldn't do like check Facebook or say something emotional or impulsive, I give myself a tally. This helps in two ways. First, it allows me to actually see just how much these things happen throughout the course of the day. It is humbling to realize just how much I have been a slave to these bad habits each and every day for so long. Second, by noting, it actually allows me to let those feelings go. It's like "Ok, I acknowledge you, now I can continue what I am doing." This whole process is called biofeedback. And apparently, according to science (and we don't really know why), but counting negative thoughts or impulses each day for a sustained period of time will actually cause them to taper off. The number goes up at first as you become more sensitive to it, but then as you become accustomed to noticing these things, they hold less power and start to recur less often. It's only day two for me, so time will tell. But it is exciting to think about!
3. Visualize Yourself Succeeding- I owe this one to Emotional Intelligence 2.0. I have been QUEEN of the imagining worst case scenarios for as long as I can remember. I should really have a gold medal in it. In fact, that skill, combined with always being right, means I have actually made several of them come true!! And wow! It's amazing how much you no longer care about being right when you're miserable. Who wants to be right about all of the worst things in life? You wish you hadn't been right, and yet it is you who steered the car here the whole way.
So now that I've seen what happens when I picture the worst... it comes true. So I can only imagine that it must work the opposite way as well! So many people avoid picturing the best case scenario or getting hopes up to avoid disappointment. I used to be one of those people. The basic logic makes sense. I have to believe there's a sort of happy medium here: being able to prepare for and accept the worst, while hoping and working towards the best.
