How do you define your habits?
The words we use in our heads to define our actions against a specific habit play a significant role in our likelihood of succeeding in completing that habit in the future.
No one feels good when someone tells them that they are bad at something. It’s even worse when we are the ones telling ourselves that we are bad!
We relate ‘bad’ to personality traits such as ‘useless’, ‘poor’, ‘unsuccessful’ or ‘hopeless’, all of which are forms of negative mindset. If you listen to someone with low self-esteem, you will often hear these sorts of words coming from their own mouths. Sadly, for one reason or another, they put themselves down and these words become habitual in their dictionary.
Seldom do we make long term positive improvements to our daily life by putting ourselves down or feeling like crap.
This is why so many people give up on diets. Sure they struggle to follow whatever diet rules they set themselves but ultimately they give up on the diet as they get fed up with feeling like they constantly fail. No one likes to feel bad.
When it comes to habits, how often do you tell yourself that you have a bad habit of ‘Making excuses’ or ‘Just not getting things done’ when you miss a training session or eat poorly?
Repeating that fact you are ‘bad’ at getting things done becomes part of your own vocabulary and research shows us that by repeating these types of phrases increases the likelihood of us repeating these same avoidance strategies in the future. We become so familiar with how we define and label ourselves that it becomes easier to act upon these labels in the future.
Your words create your identity and if you continually repeat negative words, you associate with a negative ability to get a specific habit or task done.
Similarly, if you identify that you have multiple bad habits that you ‘really need to change’, by association you are stating that you relate your identity with having lots of negative traits.
Your internal vocabulary is putting yourself down which creates a negative mindset.
The biggest issue here is that this all happens below our conscious awareness so whilst you may not feel that you are being negative or associating yourself with negative actions, repeating anything creates a pattern. Your brain loves patterns and the more you associate or use ‘bad habits’ in your head, the more of a pattern of using this type of label you create. Eventually, completely out of your awareness, you will find yourself thinking that you ‘ALWAYS skip training and that this is typical of you’. You may hear these associations starting to form, ‘I ALWAYS do this to myself, why do I ALWAYS do this?!’.
Defining anything as good or bad is a form of black and white thinking. In turn, black and white thinking is, by definition, end of spectrum thinking, (good on one end, bad on the other). It suggests something is either right or wrong and since we associate our identity with our actions, someone with lots of ‘bad habits’ will associate with being good or bad…it’s impossible not to.
So what is a more helpful way?
I try to encourage clients to label habits as ‘supportive’ towards their goal or ‘unsupportive’. Using such terms allows shades of grey to be seen and, more importantly, puts a habit into context.
Here is a real life example I have heard a lot during lockdown:
You decide that you ‘need’ to lose weight so will stop drinking during the week. This sounds like a ‘good habit’ as it means less calories going in meaning that, at the end of the day, you are more likely to create a calorie deficit.
Sounds logical.
The first few days you avoid wine but on day 4 you have a bad day. Lockdown has been tough, work was awful, (worse than usual), you feel more trapped than usual with lockdown restrictions, your kids who are also stuck at home have been fighting and whining all day and you burn the dinner as your mind is elsewhere.
You instinctively poor a glass of wine in the evening to cope and then realise you were trying to break this bad habit and now you’ve failed at that as well.
Why are you so crap at just sticking to a simple habit?
It’s not complicated – just don’t pour a glass of wine! How hard can that be?? Why is your willpower so poor at something so simple? You’ve failed already so you may as well drink the whole bloody bottle.
You’ve failed and now feel even worse. You have a bad habit and you’re bad for giving in so quickly.
Sound familiar?
But let’s try putting this habit into context:
Sure, drinking alcohol is usually ‘unsupportive’ to losing weight.
However, after the day from hell that you’ve just battled through and survived, if your coping mechanism is a single glass of wine, you will probably find on this particular day, that glass of wine is actually a supportive habit. It helps you get through everything else and gives you something to focus on to look forward to.
Sure, repeating this habit daily wouldn’t be supportive for weight loss but if it helps you on the worst of days, what is unsupportive most of the time suddenly becomes supportive some of the time.
Habits are context dependant.
Seeing your habit in this light stops you feeling like a failure, increases the likelihood of making heathier longer term associations with habits and your identity around them and decreases the risk of all or nothing, ‘I’ve screwed up now, I may as well give up/drink the whole bottle’ type thinking (which really is unsupportive to any habit).
In the longer term, rather than focusing on giving up your unsupportive habit of drinking in the evenings, you may look at ‘what habit could I adopt to help me cope with daily stress’ so the need to drink when stressed diminishes?
This represents a better longer term strategy than ‘giving up my bad habit of drinking’ which assumes willpower will beat stress and anxiety. It won’t!
Conclusion
You would never teach a child to think black and white or success/failure when trying to learn new skills. A teacher should never tell a child ‘You are simply bad at learning’ so why do the same to yourself?
Habits are context dependant.
If you don’t create context for a habit, you really are over simplifying what are often quite intricate coping mechanisms that you have spent years unwittingly developing to help you get through life.
Avoiding defining yourself or your habits as end of spectrum ‘good or bad’ is a big step forwards in understanding yourself and why you act like you do. It is only when we adopt this understanding that we really learn how to change our future actions.
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