Dealing with Habits

 

Building a new habit is fairly simple: you do the habit you want (let’s say exercise) right after a trigger (let’s say your morning coffee), and repeat that enough times that it becomes automatic. After awhile, when the trigger happens, the urge to do the habit automatically arises.

 

So why do we have such difficulty forming habits? It turns out that some things get in the way of this simple process:

 

•         Fear of doing the new habit. Exercise & meditation are two good examples — people have fears about them (they’re hard, uncomfortable, confusing, etc.) and so they avoid them and run to distractions instead.

•         Being tired or things coming up that get in the way. There are legitimate reasons not to do the habit. But if we’re committed to the new habit, we can figure out solutions to these obstacles, like going to bed earlier or planning ahead to find a new time to do the habit if something will get in the way tomorrow. And so it’s a learning process, but what really gets in the way is that we give up when we fail, because we have an ideal that we’ll succeed immediately.

•         Old habits die hard. When we start a new habit, we’re changing an old habit. Exercise in the morning is replacing reading Facebook and blogs in the morning. So doing the new habit requires consciously letting go of the old habit and mindfully doing the new habit until it becomes more automatic and habitual.

 

Those are not insurmountable obstacles, but each one requires letting go of something:

 

1.      Let go of an ideal that’s causing the fear.

2.      Let go of the ideal that we’ll succeed immediately, and instead

accept failure as part of the learning process, and consciously and continuously find ways to improve.

3.      Let go of the old habit and mindfully do the new one instead.

 

And so the skill of letting go can help us mindfully form new habits.