Habits: Making & Breaking— Insights from a Maryland Therapist
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. you fall to the level of your systems.”— james clear, author of Atomic habits.
How much choice do you feel that you have about your habits?
Habits. It seems like we are always in some sort of never-ending cycle of trying to make the ones we want and break the ones that are getting in our own way.
a therapy/coaching/hypnotherapy crossover event
Like those episodes when characters and storylines from two+ different tv shows get mashed together for one weird, wild storyline, this blog post hits all the therapy, hypnotherapy and the coaching angles, because we are pretty much all always dealing with habits. It can be maddening to feel like we’re going round and round on the same old territory again and again, like Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day. But we can take some comfort in knowing that pretty much everyone else is facing this same challenge too. We all want to know how to make and keep the habits that will serve us and how to let go of the ones that are hard to shake, even when we know they aren’t helping us.
“We first make our habits, and then our habits make us.”— attributed to John Dryden
We don’t know for sure that poet John Dryden actually came up with the quote above, but it’s the most common attribution for the quote so we’re going to go with it for now because it’s too good not to share. It’s so simple but true—we do things and they become habits (good, bad or neutral), and those things that we do over and over and over and over again shape who we are, our behaviors and our interactions. Have you ever felt like a habit has gotten away from you and booted you out of the driver’s seat of conscious choosing? You would not be alone. Habits are always forming within us as our brains work to optimize functioning (brains do not love working hard so they will try to pick up patterns and automate stuff every chance they get—it’s way to0 high of an energy cost to the brain to have to actively think through every moment all the time). Habits are how we learned to feed ourselves and write our names and put our seatbelts on every time we get in the car and all kinds of things.
Who Makes our habits?
Many of those early developmental habits that we refined early in life were supported and encouraged by the adults that cared for us—they repeatedly showed us how to tie our shoes, reinforced our learning by cheering for us when we figured out how to write our names, modeled and reminded us to buckle up every time we got in the car. The set routines at school told us when it was snack time and lunch time and we got used to eating at those times. We made some of our own habits—many of us go through the same routine, in the same order, when we take a shower or brush our teeth. Have you ever thought about who makes/influences your habits when you find that you’ve reached for your phone and opened up a social media app before you’ve made any conscious choice to do so? Companies spend big, big money to try to figure out how to influence the habits of consumers, and they often get pretty good at it. How many of our habits serve us?
Take it from the top
Let’s go back up to the quote at the very top of this post, the one from James Clear. The first time I heard that quote, it literally stopped me in my tracks. I was listening to a podcast while out on a walk and my mind was loosely focused on the podcast, the walk and the roughly 4.5 zillion thoughts and sensations in my body. But that statement made me stop walking, rewind those 30 seconds and play it again so I could listen with my whole brain. “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems”. Yep, that tracks. I can have all the great goals in the world but if I don’t have a reliable system for making consistent progress towards them over time, I will be forever thrown off by the fact that life happens and everything gets sidetracked. Systems are the collection of, usually daily, habits that you engage in consistently over time. When my systems are working well, I’m engaging in those daily actions over and over again that move me in the directions of my goals. Without those systems, I might be able to ride a wave of motivation for a few days or weeks but then, motivation fizzles, life happens, and the progress towards my goals slows or stalls. Motivation is fickle.
What about habits we want to lose?
If it’s so hard to make and maintain a habit, how come we can’t lose unhelpful ones more easily? There’s a few different parts to this, but one big part is that thing about how brains are not happy about extra effort. Once a habit is set it there, it feels really effortful, and sometimes really uncomfortable, to do it differently, so our brains kind of resist this, even if it’s something that’s good for us. Have you ever learned how to do something really well in a totally wrong way and then had to correct it—whether it was something about how to play an instrument or a sport or use a tool? Once you learned it that first way, your brain was really glad to make it easy and almost automatic. But then you find out that you’ve been doing it wrong and now have to learn it a whole different way. That new, second, correct way is going to feel WRONG, WRONG, WRONG to your brain and body for a while. You have to think about it carefully again, it feels weird, and you still end up doing it the old way sometimes for a while. Brains are not big on changing things that they thought they had settled. None of this means we’re doomed and at the mercy of our habits, but having some understanding about the uphill climb we’ve got can improve our sense of kindness and compassion for ourselves for how tough this can be and how much effort and time it may take.
habit work in therapy, coaching & hypnotherapy
Habit work comes up in all the territories of therapy, coaching and hypnotherapy. There’s a good deal of overlap in how to work with habits in these different spheres, and also some differences depending on the approach we’re taking. None of it is a quick fix. Like most things, there’s a bunch of trial and error, adjustments, and setbacks at times. But it can be really nice to have someone on your side throughout the process for guidance, suggestions, encouragement and accountability. If you’re looking for more understanding about habits for yourself, there’s a number of very good books out there. In addition to James Clear’s Atomic Habits, I’m also a big fan of Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg and Habits by Charles Duhigg.
Reach out for skilled support from a maryland therapist & coach
If you are looking for support in making or breaking habits that support your wellbeing, please reach out. I offer a free 15-minute phone consultation to hear about what’s going on with you and see if I might be able to help. For information about therapy, coaching and hypnotherapy services that I provide in College Park, and online in the state of Maryland (and beyond for coaching), you can find all that from my home page.
