Habitually Right      by Al Coon Is That All?

It’s just a habit. Have you heard that before? For someone who is struggling under the slavery of a tough habit the word “just” is a slap in the face. Someone who has no idea what you are going through belittles your struggle by suggesting that it is “just a habit”, and that makes it easy to deal with. You must be an inferior sort of person to not simply change it with the wave of your hand.

When I was a smoker I heard this often—usually with the further belittling “dirty,” “filthy,” and/or “little” thrown in as adjective modifiers to the word habit—and I heard it even from those who had quit at some point in their lives by simply “laying them down.” (That is like someone who gained a couple of pounds and lost them suggesting that he simply backed off a bit and took care of the problem, so why can’t you?) Habits are as individual as the ones who own them, or are owned by them. No one can judge the power of your habits, except you, as you face them from day to day.

If you were out hiking along a mountainside, and you came across the opening of a cave, you might wonder how big the cave is. The range of possible sizes would be very much like the range of possibilities for the size of a habit. It might me a shallow little alcove that could be filled in with a pick and shovel in a short time, or it might be the opening to something as large as the Carlsbad Caverns: large enough to house a small city. They both would be caves, just like two habits might be habits, but the difference is quite profound. Your habits are your own, and you have to be the judge of how tough they are to change and how important they are to you. No outsider, with his nose in the air, can judge that for you, no matter how eager he may be to do so.

Why do you do it? What makes a habit happen? All true habits begin with repetition. It is a very cool thing the mind does really. If you do something over and over for a few weeks, your mind just takes it over, and files it away as something you want to do, and it does it for you without your having to think about it. It becomes part of you. A great deal of what you do with your life is done as habit, without much thought on your part as to why you are doing it.

In fact, once you develop a habit, you actually feel stressed when you are in the situation where the habit should kick in, but you can’t do it. Have you been in a car where you couldn’t wear your seat belt for some reason? When I was growing up no car had seatbelts and therefore nobody wore them. No thought was given to wearing them. Today, most people would feel really strange, and perhaps very unsafe, when they can’t put the belt on. The habit is ingrained.

Creative 'Habit-eering'

You can create your own habits at will for a great many parts of your life. You can train yourself to brush after every meal, or to use deep breathing when you are feeling stressed. You put the silverware on the table in a set order without a thought, and the plates, and glasses are put in the cupboard in their proper place, even when you are thinking about something else entirely. Each of these habits was originally thought about, and then the action was repeated enough times to form a habit. Once formed it runs itself.

These types of habits are more in the area of skills, or organization; you wanted some particular benefit, and you then decided upon a course of action that would bring you that benefit, and you proceeded to take that course.

I can still remember when I built the habit of wearing a seat belt. My folks had given me a 1964 VW bug in the summer of 1970 as a combination graduation and a wedding present, and the previous owner had installed seat belts in it. I had taken driver’s training in school and one movie they showed us had a highway patrolman who stated, “I have never unbuckled a dead body from a car at an accident.” That had impressed me obviously, because when I saw the seatbelt in my car, I decided to learn to start wearing it. For nearly 19 years of my life I had never worn one, so it would take some effort. My method was to make sure that I laid the seatbelt across the seat bottom when I took it off, so I would have to sit on it when I got in, reminding me to put it on. (The belt did not retract and there was no shoulder harness either, just a lap belt.)

That was all it took. I could remember to drop the seatbelt on the seat, because I had this odd pulling sensation when I tried to get out of the car at first. “Oh, that’s right, I have my belt on.” That made me think about it, and while I was thinking about it, I put the belt back across the seat as I was leaving. It was a very odd thing at first, but over time that habit became so deeply ingrained that I am very uncomfortable today if I can’t put my belt on.

This is how you can make a habit: you choose your course of action, and then you set up a routine where you will be reminded to do it every time until it becomes ingrained and you no longer have to think about it. This is a powerful tool, which we will discuss more a bit later on.

There is another type of habit, that also began with repetition but it wasn’t planned. If you find yourself in an uncomfortable situation, perhaps with confrontation, or being stuck in traffic, and you stuff food into your mouth without thinking about it, that is a habit. It came about in response to life’s unhappy elements and your mind found a defense mechanism to use to get you past the unpleasantness.

Unfortunately, neither eating to make you feel better, nor smoking to lower your stress level, is a healthy response to these issues. And to make matters worse, habits formed in this way are more difficult to correct. Anyone who was really hooked on cigarettes, and found that he could not just put them down and walk away from them, knows that the physical withdrawal from nicotine is nothing compared with the psychological withdrawal. It is the mental connection with a situation and the defense mechanism the mind has developed to cope with it that makes quitting so hard for a serious smoker. And it is just as true for the serious overeater.

A normal habit is something that you can change by making a choice and applying effort. You choose to wear a seatbelt, or a helmet, to brush your teeth, what type of clothes you will wear, what TV shows you will or will not watch, and so on. Then you perform the behavior, repeatedly doing it, until you don’t think about it any longer as you do it.

When a habit is truly outside of your control then you cannot change it. Things like breathing, eating a bare sustenance level, and drinking water are things that we really have very little control over. And that is a good thing, because when we sleep or are knocked unconscious, our bodies try to keep breathing for us. When we are dangerously hungry or thirsty, we are very powerfully driven to take in the food and water that we need.

Where we can run into trouble is when our minds turn against us, and put things into this category that shouldn’t be there. This is pathological, and when that happens, we need to reach out for help. Remember, if you are drowning because you cannot swim, it doesn’t matter how many strong swimmers seem to be having no difficulty, there is no shame in reaching out for help, and taking that lifesaver that is being thrown to you. Drowning is far too high a price to pay for false dignity. Getting the help we need when we need it is the right thing to do, and it is the strong thing to do.

Doing the Impossible

In the areas of your life that may seem impossible to change, you may find that you can get around the roadblocks in your way. For many years I believed that quitting smoking was impossible for me. I had resigned myself to being a smoker until I died. I had never gone more than 12 hours without a cigarette before caving in and having one. I was too weak to quit. I couldn’t do it. Why even try?

Then, in 1986, Dotti and I took a quit smoking course at the Portsmouth Naval Hospital in Virginia. They taught us to break the impossible task of quitting into small possible tasks. My Carlsbad Cavern sized habit was something that could be changed. I could quit!

I went through many false starts, and several quit attempts, but today I have been smoke free for over 9 years. The ground is still settling. (I had a bout last week where I had to wrestle a bit with the idea of buying a pack of cigarettes, but the bad idea never had a chance really. I foresaw this very struggle before I quit, and wrote a letter to my future self, giving me a pep talk that I still use from time to time.) But I did quit, when I thought I never could.

Whether it is something that you must get help with, or merely something that is tough, there is nothing weak or shameful in reaching out for help to others, whether they are friends or trained professionals. What matters are the results you want to achieve, and the changes you want to see implemented in your life.

Never assume that anything that you are unhappy with in your life is impossible to change; you are a marvelous creature with abilities and capacity for change and excellence that you could never exhaust in 10 lifetimes. Time is the only thing that can truly limit what you can do. Take the time—make the time—to change the important things in your life that need to be changed. Start today.

How Do I Make a Change?

Mastery is: not thinking about it. Whenever we learn a new skill, such as bowling a strike, driving a golf ball off a tee, blocking a karate punch, or playing a new chord progression, we have not mastered the skill as long as we have to think about it during its execution. The point of practice is to reach the level of skill to where your body does it by habit, without conscious interference.

Habits are so powerful because they act without your telling them to. When they are doing constructive things, that is wonderful, but when they are producing destructive behavior, then they need to be changed. The problem is that when you suddenly stop doing what your habit is programmed to do, you feel deprived. Your body throws a little temper tantrum demanding that it be allowed to have its own way.

That is why the secret to changing a habit is to replace it with something else. For example, if you have a habit of sitting in front of the television while eating a bag of potato chips, you will be quite uncomfortable trying to sit there without the chips. On the other hand, if you find something else that is tasty but has fewer calories, you can replace the chip habit over time with something less problematic.

“Steppin’ Time”

Dotti and I go over to Mount St. Helens from time to time, and there is a hiking trail there, called the Truman Trail, and it goes up to a great viewpoint. The trail cuts right up the side of a steep hill. Now they don’t just drop us a rope and expect us to climb it. They don’t even have a ladder with rungs for us to scale our way to the top. Instead they cut over 400 steps into the hillside. The steps are oddly shaped, many are longer than what we would consider normal. But the steps make the long climb doable. They also put in some resting spots with benches, so it is easier still.

Making things easy is making things right! That is the whole basis of the old cliché “Slow but sure.” Each step is easy, something that you can handle. The step is taken, and then you make your advance secure. Once you become comfortable with that step, you take the next one.

A great American, Benjamin Franklin, once said, “Haste makes waste.” In no area of life is this truer than in the changing of habits. If you take your time and do it right, most habits are fairly easy to change; all it takes is repetition, doing something over and over again for a few weeks (usually about 6 of them).

A new habit is like a seed. If you nurture it, and give it what it needs, it will become hardy, and rich. It will be robust, and unmovable. On the other hand, if you rush it along, you may dislodge its roots, causing it to sicken and die. Patience is the key to winning this fight. It doesn’t take a great deal of effort or will power, just perseverance.

Handling the Complex

Have you ever thought about the complexity of your life? I don’t mean just when it gets busy and the world seems to be kicking in the door to get your attention. I mean even on the most tranquil of days when things are peaceful and nothing is going wrong. You have to be able to wake up each morning and make sense of the world about you: the room you are in; the bed you are lying upon; the bathroom mirror; your clothes; and the breakfast table. The English language, and the microwave oven, all are under your command. The list is unending of the things that you manage to juggle in your mind each day, and often without difficulty. And you can thank your habits for that!

When I wake up in the morning (where’s my coffee?) I have performed a number of tasks before I am really all the way awake. My habits have moved me about the house and made the right things happen (usually) to get me started on my day. This is quite a powerful system that we have in our heads to handle complexity.

Our minds break our lives up into compartments, and then assign habits to operate the things in our lives that fall into these compartments. We have favorite words and expressions to deal with certain emotions and events. We have restaurants that we habitually frequent, and menu items that we habitually order. We have a preferred route to drive to habitually visited locations, and it isn’t always the fastest or shortest. We deal with many complex people with our habitual aplomb, and even emergencies and other unexpected events have habitual responses that rise to the surface when needed. It is only when the habits fail to handle something that we have to take personal control and think the situation out and then choose what we are going to do.

It seems like we are always making our choices consciously, but we ignore the far more numerous choices that have been made for us during our day by our habits. For example, just think about one moment on a freeway with cars all around you going 70 miles per hour, but some faster and some slower, with a whole set of lanes to the left with cars coming at you at the same speed, all while you are doing the speed limit yourself (of course, those blue lights flashing on the car coming rapidly from behind can’t be for you, as you habitually tap your brake ☺).

Now, if you had to take in all of the cars, the moving scenery, the signs, the bridges, and the rain that is starting to fall, all at the same time, you would go into overload. But we often drive through this complex and crazy road system completely on autopilot while thinking about some other problem in our lives. We may not even remember much of the drive once we arrive at our destination. How incredibly powerful and talented our habits are!

And your being aware of this puts that tremendous power directly into your hands, as you change your life, one habit at a time. By changing them, you can control what your habits are doing, as long as you move slowly, one step at a time, with purpose in mind, and by getting help anytime that you run into a difficult part of the process: books; classes; support groups; and counseling when needed—remember to reach out and grab that lifesaver!

One last piece of advice as you are changing your habits: watch out for your friends. As you are making changes in your life your supportive friends will be a tremendous help, but saboteurs are far too common to ignore. Make sure that your friends are helping you, and not trying to trip up the changes you are trying to make.

Remember, with PLANNING and with EFFORT, you can live a life that is HABITUALLY RIGHT for you.

-Al-

~~~Change One by John Hastings