Habituation
A few years ago I bought James Clear's book, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. At the time, I was desperately wanting to break a powerfully habituated behavior involving food, wanting to motivate myself to be more efficient. At that point in time, I was still very much measuring, measuring, measuring, measuring myself.
How am I doing? Am I making progress? Am I getting better? Am I being more productive? Did I do better today than yesterday? I was in constant judgement of myself. The harsh critical judgements on myself were not helpful, they were harmful. They burned a lot of my energy. They led to rigid thinking and perfectionism. I ordered the book to break out of destructive habits and make a more efficient, improved, better version of me.
I was driven by a deeply wired, unconscious belief that I am not good enough, that I am in some fashion broken and need fixing. His book was my new solution. I placed a tremendous expectation on his book to fix me, make me better. And at that time, I was not aware of this deeply rooted belief.
For anyone new to his ideas, James Clear shares a summary of his book on his website https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits-summary. My intention here is not to review or summarize James Clears book, just share my own experience and interactions with some of his ideas.
James Clear explains the science of how neural pathways operate and how by doing something over and over again, I strengthen those pathways and build a habit. I can use that information to build pathways to create and emphasize healthy behaviors. I can also avoid doing things so that strong, unhelpful, pathways that fire automatically (habituated) do not get used as frequently and subsequently lose strength. This is very helpful information to me.
Clear offers the idea that to help yourself build habits you can add the new habit to an existing habit. He calls it habit stacking and offers a formula and several examples on his website, https://jamesclear.com/habit-stacking
After/Before [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].
For example:
After I pour my cup of coffee each morning, I will meditate for one minute.
After I take off my work shoes, I will immediately change into my workout clothes.
After I sit down to dinner, I will say one thing I’m grateful for that happened today.
After I get into bed at night, I will give my partner a kiss.
After I put on my running shoes, I will text a friend or family member where I am running and how long it will take.
So, four years ago, when I first got the book, my morning routine I habit stacked to be
Coffee, stretch, breath work, meditation
Walk dog, early morning sunshine, water walk
Eat breakfast, shower, get ready for work
I used existing habits to launch new ones. What happened over time is I realized that checking the thing off the list became more important than doing the thing. I wasn’t connected and present to what I was doing. So, the really important lesson for me that I learned from James Clear is about habituation. I could see how any form of habituated action takes me out of the present moment. And that prompted me to start questioning a lot of things.
I used to tell myself, and clients, it is okay for things like tying your shoe or unlocking the door to be habituated. Then I started to question, is it okay for even the small things to be habituated? Because if I'm unlocking the door and I'm not paying attention and if I am not paying attention then I am making myself less safe. If I'm driving down the road and I'm operating my vehicle from an automatic place, my brain is firing and doing the driving but my mind is caught up so intensely in thought that my focus is not on the driving. I can get to my destination and not remember the drive. I can see that habituated behavior can make me, and the world around me, less safe.
That is when I started to refer to habituation as the enemy. I could see how I had habituated so many things I could easily go through an entire day not being present, not being aware. So, perhaps saying habituation is the enemy is critical and I want to be careful of the language I use to talk about myself. In calling habituation the enemy, I am referring to how my brain automates something as the enemy. My brain and how it works is part of me and if I view anything about me as the enemy, it creates an emotion, a hostility. Creating a hostility to myself for how my brain works leads me to feeling I am bad or wrong and I don’t want to do that. I have filled my quota of hating myself.
I have learned that habituation takes me out of awareness and I need to be aware of what I am doing to avoid engaging in distorted, maladaptive thoughts and behaviors. Habituation can turn an adaptive tool into a maladaptive tool. I learned that habituation can make me less safe, less aware, less present. I am committed to developing presence, developing awareness and learning to rely on my sensory input to guide me. So, I can take certain ideas from James Clear and habit stacking and adapt them to help me develop awareness, presence and hone my senses.
How do I do that? I use change as a constant and treat each habit as an opportunity for meditation. If we go back to the morning habit stack I developed a few years ago, I pretty much do the same things, however, I do not do them in the same order or for the same periods of time.
So, this morning, I stretched while I was waiting for my coffee to brew. The stretching was focused on spinal flexion and extension, because I woke up feeling like my back was a little stiff. I also incorporated a few mobility rod movements for my shoulders. Then I drank my coffee, I let myself feel the warmth of the cup in my hands and focused on the smell of the aroma before each sip. Next, I sat down for breathwork to prepare for meditation. I chose a 15 minute sequence of active exhale and passive inhales followed by a 3 minute breath hold. For meditation, I decided on a form of Vipassana.
When my dog growled at me, I concluded my meditation and walked him. Our walk coincided with the early morning sunrise. Being in a time crunch with work, I postponed getting in the water until the evening and proceeded with breakfast. I checked in with my level of hunger and decided I wasn’t quite ready to eat. Instead, I chose to tackle a couple work projects until I was hungry, then asked what I felt like eating. I made the meal that sounded good, cleaned up and proceeded to shower and ready myself for work.
This was a fairly typical morning, and each day, I change up little things with each habit to help myself be present and enhance my awareness. My stretches will shift to accommodate what my body needs to feel comfortable, I make different coffees, and approach the consumption mindfully, I change the breathwork frequently, either the style or length of practice or both. I shift between styles and lengths of meditation. My dog wakes at a different time each day (as do I), and we walk different routes and lengths of time each day. My time and activity in the water each day (or evening) is based on what I feel I need and what I feel I have energy for and that changes each day.
My focus is not on getting the things done and checking it off my list, my focus is on my needs, my energy, my awareness, my presence. My focus on constantly changing elements of each habit is to remind my brain that change is constant, to remind my brain to stay flexible, to remind my brain to stay aware of meeting my needs.
In this way, I feel I am protecting myself from habituating behavior and getting caught in the old neural pathways that measure me, judge me and treat me like a robot checking things off a list of behaviors. Whichever way I do things takes energy and I would rather spend my energy being present. My experience with James Clear’s ideas has helped me develop my inner wise guide, understand habituation, see how referring to habituation as the enemy is harming me, and given me a framework to turn my habits into opportunities for meditation.
