mercurial scribe

Each January 1st, nearly everyone I know has created a list of things they are going to change about themselves: their weight, their debt-to-income ratio, their savings account, their job. Yet by April, those gyms are empty of their first quarter rush and those credit cards? Hello credit limit.

It was for this reason I stopped doing New Year’s Resolutions back when I was a teenager. It didn’t work. It wasn’t personal. And I HATE failing which, inevitably, I always did.

Screw breaking up, it’s changing that’s so hard to do!

But why?

I thought long and hard about this. It is a considerably important idea to me right now. As we pack everything we own to move yet again, I realize the bad habits we’ve accumulated, say like leaving a few empty glasses on the coffee table until they multiply and their great-great-grandchildren have developed some kind of funky fungal growth that smells like a poopy diaper. Or the fact I have had tons of free time due to the worker’s comp situation and yet I have written and queried publishers very little.

But why is the act of changing these bad habits - something so simple as putting the empty glass in the dishwasher and scheduling my time better - so difficult?

Reason #1: Homeostasis

This is a biological term referring to an organism’s internal stability. Merriam-Webster.com defines it as “a relatively stable state of equilibrium or a tendency toward such a state between the different but interdependent elements or groups of elements of an organism…” In other words, it’s an organism’s ability to stay relatively the same without changing. Your brain is hardwired to do what you have been trained to do, thanks to that ever wonderful cranial hormone known as dopamine. And without dopamine? Well, you wouldn’t want to eat, have sex, wouldn’t have an attention span or a very good memory or various other good and rewarding habits that keep you and the human race going. Which leads us to Reason #2…

Reason #2: The Habit Serves a Purpose

Dopamine is a main factor in this reason. This chemical is the very reason behavioral conditioning like that of Pavlov’s dog is possible. The perfect example of this is sex. You copulate with a partner and directly after your body reaches orgasm, permitting the possibility of pregnancy and the creation of another human life, your brain absolutely floods your system with dopamine as a reward, like a Scooby snack for a well-performed trick.

Now let’s step back a bit and apply this to a less sexual, more typical-bad-habit situation. This habit you have and are trying to break - say, smoking. It’s serving a purpose and that’s why your brain keeps rewarding the behavior. Let’s say you smoke to relieve stress. Each time you puff and you feel a little more relaxed, your brain releases some dopamine telling you that relieving stress is good, rewarding you so that you’ll do it again. Wash, rinse, repeat and you’ve developed a nasty cigarette habit.

Now, all we reasonably intelligent and informed people know that tobacco, in all its puffing and chewing forms, is bad for you. As an intelligent and informed individual, you try to break that bad habit cold turkey… from 2 packs a day. And you fail. Again.

Reason #3: Unrealistic Expectations Coupled with Perfectionism

You can also refer to this reason as the “I’ll quit my 2 pack a day habit cold turkey and I’ll get it down pat the first time” factor. If quitting cold turkey was so easy to do, wouldn’t you have done it already without so much as flinching? I thought so. And in what world has anyone run the perfect two hour marathon the first time they ever slipped on a pair of Asics runners? Never?

PRECISELY. So why in the world would you expect that kind of insanity from yourself?

Yet people do this all the time. To stick with the smoking scenario, I had a friend Danny who was so proud of herself after she hit two weeks without cigarettes. The next day, I found her behind the restaurant we both worked at with a whole pack in her hands!

“What are you doing?!”

She looked at me sheepishly. “I broke down and had a cigarette last night after a fight with my boyfriend. I figured I screwed up so I might as well go get me a pack from the liquor store.”

Though she eventually did quit smoking, Danny had to learn that one mess up - one cigarette or that one extra large slice of chocolate cake - does not mean the end to all of your habit-breaking efforts. Just because a baby falls after taking a few steps doesn’t mean she gives up on walking altogether!

Reason #4: Self-betrayal

How often in any habit-breaking process have you found yourself promising to go to the gym after work if you get to sleep in the extra 45 minutes now. And then you don’t. You made a promise to yourself and then you broke it. What happens when a friend or a lover does that to you?

You slowly start to lose your trust in them.

The same thing applies to lying to yourself, whether it be outright as in the situation above or in the unrealistic expectations you place on yourself. No matter what, when you fail yourself, it is only human nature to be harsh. But what if, instead of expecting perfection that cannot be achieved, you expected something more simple, more honest. Instead of no cigarettes ever from this moment on and if I do have a cigarette, it’s all over… how about you tier down. Say, for the next two weeks, you’ll only smoke 1/2 of what you normally do. And each two weeks, you cut down by 1/2. It is a lot to ask, but not unrealistic.

In the next post of this series, I’ll be writing about how you can actually break those bad habits you’re itching to rid yourself of by applying the concepts of this post and a few creative tricks of my own.