Tag: habitual responses

A Habitual Moon

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It’s a full moon today so energy will be high. How fun that it’s also Halloween. How sad that everyone will be stuck inside in front of Zoom screens. Apparently one aspect of a full moon, or at least the affect upon us, is that we revert to our strongest habits. You won’t be able to prove that in a lab so I imagine it’ll be down to some empirical research of sorts to understand that. With us viewing the world and experiences through a presupposed narrative, I assume that empirically our understanding will be deeply flawed. A leap of faith, well it may just be necessary. Regardless I do enjoy trying to understand habits, they seem rather powerful after all.

I’m reading a book at the moment on fear and not in a typical challenge you fears kind of way but more learn to love and see the positives of fear. I’m only a quarter of the way through so I haven’t fully grasped it but there does appear to be some legitimacy in what he says. It’s called Fearvana by Akshay Nanavati if you’re curious. I won’t go into what Fearvana is exactly, mainly because I’ve not read enough that I’ll likely do it a disservice. What made me think about it though was that he mentions something about synapses in our brains which we have developed over a long time. Connections between neural pathways or something like that. Anyway these are the animalistic responses we have to situations, the habitual response we have learnt to make.

It’s another way of looking at how we behave but it’s interesting to think of it that way when observing how we behave and respond, and this can be to anything. Instead of just thinking about how this is habit, looking behind it at the science seems to help understand how malleable our behaviour is. If it’s just connections in our brain which have formed, it also means they can reform. Without saying certain things can be good or bad, we definitely have more and less desirable habits which we decide upon personally. It’s very liberating to realise what they actually are and with the brick wall coming down it also makes them surmountable.

So this full moon, observe yourself. What is it that seems to have been building up this last week especially. How do you find yourself responding to it. Do you recognise anything familiar in your behaviour, good and bad, desirable and undesirable. Can you detach yourself from it and see it for what it is. Just that first try will do. Just observe. Don’t judge and don’t box yourself. Step back. Step back from it all.

The Habitual Self-Evolution

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Now it’s not that I’m not enjoying this writing challenge that I set myself and thought others might like inflicted upon them, but when I finally decided to check to see when the last day would be and discovered it not in early October or possibly even late September, instead mid November, my heart sunk a little. There was a little glimmer of hope in my mind that I had less than two months left and it turned out I have a full three. As I said it’s not that I’m not enjoying it and I know for certain I’m getting a lot from it, but I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to not have a day in which there isn’t something at the back of my mind reminding me I still have to sit down and write something. It does feel like my one daily chore and as I write that I realise how lucky I am to have only one real chore. It’s not cool to blow ones own trumpet but for such an undisciplined person it has been a remarkable show of discipline. If only it was possible to transport that into other parts of my life.

It’s also quite easy though let’s be honest. To write four times a week but on any particular day or even at any frequency within the week would probably be more of a challenge than knowing it’s a daily routine of sitting down and doing something. When something has to be done daily there is a lack of opportunity for free thought and potential excuses. If I know I don’t necessarily have to do something today as I still have tomorrow to do it creates a different kind of challenge altogether. Discipline with choice or discipline without. I know myself and it may be a struggle. They do say, whoever ‘they’ are, that if you can do something for a whole year you will create enough of a habit to be able to maintain consistency and practice. I’ll now have a real example to use of whether I believe there to be any truth in that.

My heart sunk then when I discovered I still have a quarter of a year to go. It sunk despite knowing I enjoy and appreciate the benefits of doing this. This isn’t about really refining any styles, although I hope I will have done without realising. I’ll read from the beginning one day and see if my writing evolved over the time. It is about creating the habit of doing something regularly. I know I repeat myself a lot, or assume I do, but certainly I see a huge importance in understanding, observing and changing habit where necessary. So much of our lives are defined by habit. Arguably our actions and potentially even characters are just a series of habits formed from birth. We can say we have both good and bad habits and there would be validity in such a statement but I would like to explore whether it’s possible to challenge all habits no matter how they’re viewed in my mind. Can we be habit free? If habits are character defining then the answer is probably no but it would certainly be fun trying to find out. In the meantime this is simply one more piece closer to a new and hopefully long term habit. I share this with you, and pretend sometimes it’s for you, but let’s be honest I’m just using you all in my quest for some kind of self-evolution.

The Barrier Of Conditions

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“Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.”

It’s always nice to start with some Camus. These French (-Algerian) intellectuals really knew how to get people thinking and living. So thinking we must do. What conditions have we attached to our own happiness then. A momentary chance for some introspective thought perhaps. If we are honest with ourselves we will see the conditions we either try to live by or aspire to. If we are willing to take that further we may just accept an imbalance between the desire to achieve an idea over allowing happiness to happen. How much of this then is influenced by our habitual responses to moments and life. The conditions we set on life are nothing but ideas and learned responses to moments. We are fixed. If we create these conditions, or we have these conditions created for us and we accept them as such, and either refuse or are unable to view any other version of happiness, we likely set ourselves up for failure.

If there is anything this year has taught it’s that being fixed and not being able to look beyond our narrow ideas of future and desire will only lead to our own suffering. I doubt there are many people out there currently who have managed to live the exact version of 2020 as they had foreseen and hoped for when the first of January ding donged into existence. Most people are either working from home, still furloughed, back in their workplace or redundant. Had anyone here not been able to accept this change then they would suffer. Their previous conditions of happiness would be impossible to achieve. Habits have had to change.

This can only be a good thing. One benefit of immigration as people come from different cultures they view the one they’re entering with a fresh perspective. Those who live within their own culture are more likely to view their world as normal and in that case how it should be, this is just the way it is both good and bad. People see what is missing because they bring part of what is normal for them with them. They see a hole with fresh eyes, fill it and changed the habitual structure of society. The populace embrace this but fear it too.

Will what we are experiencing do similar. The circumstances and events are different, it is unlikely to be about people entering a society as our miserable little island appears more closed off than ever before, but there will be tangible changes which may only become evident in a few years. What is the point of principles if they’re so limiting as to restrict any possibility of happiness. We are living in what appears to be increasingly evolving conditions and how we deal with that will determine how we move forward as a society and individually. Habitual flexibility and happiness may just turn out to be one and the same after all.

Habitual Emotions

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According to BJ Fogg habits are connected to our emotions and until we understand our emotive relationship to our habitual responses we will struggle to transform our behaviour into a series of positive actions. I may have added to and slightly paraphrased what he said but the link to our emotions is all his. He also says that we should make tiny changes to our habits and give ourselves a reward as and when we achieve our aims. He uses the example of his eighty year old father wanting to do twenty push-ups a day and believing he’ll achieve this because of his desire to do so. His father according to Fogg is displaying an outdated attitude to creating change, one of believing that if he has strength of mind and willpower to make these changes in his life; that that will be enough to make the positive difference he is after. Fogg believes instead that he should make tiny changes, perhaps two push-ups against the sink each time he’s washing his hands for example. This is an achievable goal and can be used as a base to work on. The emotive aspect comes from our need for a reward. The reward can simply be feeling happy when we achieve targets and make positive habitual changes in our lives or when we struggle feeling unhappy. These emotive responses become habit themselves.

This journey into the realms of discipline you’re going on with me is, and I’ve said this many times before, interlinked with our habits and responses. Our habitual responses to situations dictate how we behave when faced with a variety of situations big and small, and have become deeper and deeper ingrained the more we repeat them as we get older. Once we see behaviour as simply as series of habits it becomes easier to both empathetically understand other peoples actions and creates a deeper understanding of ourselves and our own behaviour. These ideas of BJ Fogg then are very interesting because what he is adding is a method to how we can make these changes. While it is still about observing your habitual responses to different situations, he suggests making these small changes you want to happen. It appears to be a more direct approach than simply observing and not repeating, or trying a new approach when you recognise the old toxic one. This is made possible by not trying to create huge and unattainable targets that will hinder your achieving the positive emotive response you unconsciously desire and require. This idea of tiny habits is a new one for me so I’m not entirely sure empirically what I think about it but it seems like common sense it a way. The danger is though that just like his father; I want it all now, I want those twenty push-ups a day. To really embrace tiny steps and tiny habits requires a deal of patience that in itself needs to be fostered habitually. Nobody ever said it was going to be easy no matter how much you desire it.